Structural brain morphometry differences and similarities between young patients with Crohn's disease in remission and healthy young and old controls.

Introduction: Crohn's disease (CD), one of the main phenotypes of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), can affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract. It can impact the function of gastrointestinal secretions, as well as increasing the intestinal permeability leading to an aberrant immunological response and subsequent intestinal inflammation. Studies have reported anatomical and functional brain changes in Crohn's Disease patients (CDs), possibly due to increased inflammatory markers and microglial cells that play key roles in communicating between the brain, gut, and systemic immune system. To date, no studies have demonstrated similarities between morphological brain changes seen in IBD and brain morphometry observed in older healthy controls.. Methods: For the present study, twelve young CDs in remission (M = 26.08 years, SD = 4.9 years, 7 male) were recruited from an IBD Clinic. Data from 12 young age-matched healthy controls (HCs) (24.5 years, SD = 3.6 years, 8 male) and 12 older HCs (59 years, SD = 8 years, 8 male), previously collected for a different study under a similar MR protocol, were analyzed as controls. T1 weighted images and structural image processing techniques were used to extract surface-based brain measures, to test our hypothesis that young CDs have different brain surface morphometry than their age-matched young HCs and furthermore, appear more similar to older HCs. The phonemic verbal fluency (VF) task (the Controlled Oral Word Association Test, COWAT) (Benton, 1976) was administered to test verbal cognitive ability and executive control. Results/Discussion: On the whole, CDs had more brain regions with differences in brain morphometry measures when compared to the young HCs as compared to the old HCs, suggesting that CD has an effect on the brain that makes it appear more similar to old HCs. Additionally, our study demonstrates this atypical brain morphometry is associated with function on a cognitive task. These results suggest that even younger CDs may be showing some evidence of structural brain changes that demonstrate increased resemblance to older HC brains rather than their similarly aged healthy counterparts.

The relevance of Spearman's g for epilepsy.

Whilst the concept of a general mental factor known as 'g' has been of longstanding interest, for unknown reasons, it has never been interrogated in epilepsy despite the 100+ year empirical history of the neuropsychology of epilepsy. This investigation seeks to identify g within a comprehensive neuropsychological data set and compare participants with temporal lobe epilepsy to controls, characterize the discriminatory power of g compared with domain-specific cognitive metrics, explore the association of g with clinical epilepsy and sociodemographic variables and identify the structural and network properties associated with g in epilepsy. Participants included 110 temporal lobe epilepsy patients and 79 healthy controls between the ages of 19 and 60. Participants underwent neuropsychological assessment, clinical interview and structural and functional imaging. Cognitive data were subjected to factor analysis to identify g and compare the group of patients with control participants. The relative power of g compared with domain-specific tests was interrogated, clinical and sociodemographic variables were examined for their relationship with g, and structural and functional images were assessed using traditional regional volumetrics, cortical surface features and network analytics. Findings indicate (i) significantly (P < 0.005) lower g in patients compared with controls; (ii) g is at least as powerful as individual cognitive domain-specific metrics and other analytic approaches to discriminating patients from control participants; (iii) lower g was associated with earlier age of onset and medication use, greater number of antiseizure medications and longer epilepsy duration (Ps < 0.04); and lower parental and personal education and greater neighbourhood deprivation (Ps < 0.012); and (iv) amongst patients, lower g was linked to decreased total intracranial volume (P = 0.019), age and intracranial volume adjusted total tissue volume (P = 0.019) and age and intracranial volume adjusted total corpus callosum volume (P = 0.012)-particularly posterior, mid-posterior and anterior (Ps < 0.022) regions. Cortical vertex analyses showed lower g to be associated specifically with decreased gyrification in bilateral medial orbitofrontal regions. Network analysis of resting-state data with focus on the participation coefficient showed g to be associated with the superior parietal network. Spearman's g is reduced in patients, has considerable discriminatory power compared with domain-specific metrics and is linked to a multiplex of factors related to brain (size, connectivity and frontoparietal networks), environment (familial and personal education and neighbourhood disadvantage) and disease (epilepsy onset, treatment and duration). Greater attention to contemporary models of human cognition is warranted in order to advance the neuropsychology of epilepsy.

Topological Embedding of Human Brain Networks with Applications to Dynamics of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

We introduce a novel, data-driven topological data analysis (TDA) approach for embedding brain networks into a lower-dimensional space in quantifying the dynamics of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) obtained from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). This embedding facilitates the orthogonal projection of 0D and 1D topological features, allowing for the visualization and modeling of the dynamics of functional human brain networks in a resting state. We then quantify the topological disparities between networks to determine the coordinates for embedding. This framework enables us to conduct a coherent statistical inference within the embedded space. Our results indicate that brain network topology in TLE patients exhibits increased rigidity in 0D topology but more rapid flections compared to that of normal controls in 1D topology.

Characterizing white matter connectome abnormalities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy using threshold-free network-based statistics.

INTRODUCTION: Emerging evidence illustrates that temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) involves network disruptions represented by hyperexcitability and other seizure-related neural plasticity. However, these associations are not well-characterized. Our study characterizes the whole brain white matter connectome abnormalities in TLE patients compared to healthy controls (HCs) from the prospective Epilepsy Connectome Project study. Furthermore, we assessed whether aberrant white matter connections are differentially related to cognitive impairment and a history of focal-to-bilateral tonic-clonic (FBTC) seizures. METHODS: Multi-shell connectome MRI data were preprocessed using the DESIGNER guidelines. The IIT Destrieux gray matter atlas was used to derive the 162 × 162 structural connectivity matrices (SCMs) using MRTrix3. ComBat data harmonization was applied to harmonize the SCMs from pre- and post-scanner upgrade acquisitions. Threshold-free network-based statistics were used for statistical analysis of the harmonized SCMs. Cognitive impairment status and FBTC seizure status were then correlated with these findings. RESULTS: We employed connectome measurements from 142 subjects, including 92 patients with TLE (36 males, mean age = 40.1 ± 11.7 years) and 50 HCs (25 males, mean age = 32.6 ± 10.2 years). Our analysis revealed overall significant decreases in cross-sectional area (CSA) of the white matter tract in TLE group compared to controls, indicating decreased white matter tract integrity and connectivity abnormalities in addition to apparent differences in graph theoretic measures of connectivity and network-based statistics. Focal and generalized cognitive impaired TLE patients showcased higher trend-level abnormalities in the white matter connectome via decreased CSA than those with no cognitive impairment. Patients with a positive FBTC seizure history also showed trend-level findings of association via decreased CSA. CONCLUSIONS: Widespread global aberrant white matter connectome changes were observed in TLE patients and characterized by seizure history and cognitive impairment, laying a foundation for future studies to expand on and validate the novel biomarkers and further elucidate TLE's impact on brain plasticity.