Thalamic nuclei changes in early and late onset Alzheimer's disease

Forno, Gonzalo, Saranathan, Manojkumar, Contador, Jose, Guillen, Nuria, Falgàs, Neus, Tort-Merino, Adrià, Balasa, Mircea, Sanchez-Valle, Raquel, Hornberger, Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2214-3788 and Lladó, Albert (2023) Thalamic nuclei changes in early and late onset Alzheimer's disease. Current Research in Neurobiology, 4. ISSN 2665-945X

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Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia worldwide. Increasing evidence points to the thalamus as an important hub in the clinical symptomatology of the disease, with the ‘limbic thalamus’ been described as especially vulnerable. In this work, we examined thalamic atrophy in early-onset AD (EOAD) and late-onset AD (LOAD) compared to young and old healthy controls (YHC and OHC, respectively) using a recently developed cutting-edge thalamic nuclei segmentation method. A deep learning variant of Thalamus Optimized Multi Atlas Segmentation (THOMAS) was used to parcellate 11 thalamic nuclei per hemisphere from T1-weighted MRI in 88 biomarker-confirmed AD patients (49 EOAD and 39 LOAD) and 58 healthy controls (41 YHC and 17 OHC) with normal AD biomarkers. Nuclei volumes were compared among groups using MANCOVA. Further, Pearson's correlation coefficient was computed between thalamic nuclear volume and cortical—subcortical regions, CSF tau levels, and neuropsychological scores. The results showed widespread thalamic nuclei atrophy in EOAD and LOAD compared to their respective healthy control groups, with EOAD showing additional atrophy in the centromedian and ventral lateral posterior nuclei compared to YHC. In EOAD, increased thalamic nuclei atrophy was associated with posterior parietal atrophy and worse visuospatial abilities, while LOAD thalamic nuclei atrophy was preferentially associated with medial temporal atrophy and worse episodic memory and executive function. Our findings suggest that thalamic nuclei may be differentially affected in AD according to the age at symptoms onset, associated with specific cortical—subcortical regions, CSF total tau and cognition.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: early onset alzheimer's disease,late onset alzheimer's disease,thomas-dl,thalamic nuclei,thalamus,bioengineering,clinical neurology,developmental neuroscience,behavioral neuroscience,neuroscience (miscellaneous),cognitive neuroscience ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1500/1502
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Norwich Institute for Healthy Aging
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Mental Health
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Lifespan Health
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 03 Apr 2023 13:30
Last Modified: 03 Nov 2023 03:19
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/91715
DOI: 10.1016/j.crneur.2023.100084

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