Abstract
This study aimed to investigate alterations of brain functional network connectivity (FNC) in lung cancer patients after chemotherapy and explore links between these FNC differences and cognitive impairment. Twenty-two lung cancer patients receiving chemotherapy and 26 healthy controls (HCs) underwent resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) and neuropsychological testing. Group independent component analysis (GICA) was applied to rs-fMRI data to extract whole-brain resting state networks (RSNs). Static and dynamic FNC (dFNC) were constructed to reveal RSNs connectivity alterations between lung cancer patients and HCs group, and the correlations between the group differences in RSNs and cognitive performance were analyzed. Our findings revealed that chemotherapeutics can produce widespread connectivity abnormalities in RSNs, mainly focused on default mode network (DMN) and executive control network. Furthermore, the dFNC analysis help identify network configurations of each state and capture more chemotherapy-induced disorders of interactions between and within RSNs, which mainly includes sensorimotor network, attentional network and auditory network. In addition, after chemotherapy, the lung cancer patients spend shorter mean dwell time (MDT) in state 2. The decreased dFNC between DMN [independent component 5 (IC5)] and DMN (IC6) in the lung cancer patients after chemotherapy in state 4 was negatively correlated with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores (r=-0.447, p=0.042). The dFNC analysis enrich our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the chemobrain, and suggested that the temporal dynamics of FNC could be a potential effective method to detect cognitive changes in lung cancer patients receiving chemotherapy.
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Imaging data could be provided upon request.
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Funding
This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (No. 18KJB320007), Nanjing Outstanding Youth Fund (No. JQX19006), and 333 High-level Talents Training Project of Jiangsu Province (No. BRA2019122).
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LH. and SD. are co-first authors of this paper, they design the experiment, analyze the data and draft the paper for the work. YZ., JY., SS., and PW. help to acquire the clinical and fMRI data. WX. helps to revise the paper critically for important intellectual content. XY. and YCC. are co-corresponding authors of this paper, they did the financial support, review and final approval of the paper to be published. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Hu, L., Ding, S., Zhang, Y. et al. Dynamic functional network connectivity reveals the brain functional alterations in lung cancer patients after chemotherapy. Brain Imaging and Behavior 16, 1040–1048 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-021-00575-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-021-00575-9