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Differentiating Patients with Parkinson’s Disease from Normal Controls Using Gray Matter in the Cerebellum

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Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders in the world. Previous studies have focused on the basal ganglia and cerebral cortices. To date, the cerebellum has not been systematically investigated in patients with PD. In the current study, 45 probable PD patients and 40 age- and gender-matched healthy controls underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging, and we used support vector machines combining with voxel-based morphometry to explore the cerebellar structural changes in the probable PD patients relative to healthy controls. The results revealed that the gray matter alterations were primarily located within the cerebellar Crus I, implying a possible important role of this region in PD. Furthermore, the gray matter alterations in the cerebellum could differentiate the probable PD patients from healthy controls with accuracies of more than 95 % (p < 0.001, permutation test) via cross-validation, suggesting the potential of analyzing the cerebellum in the clinical diagnosis of PD.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Mechatronics and Automation, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, 410073, People’s Republic of China

    Ling-Li Zeng, Liang Xie, Hui Shen, Zhiguo Luo, Peng Fang & Dewen Hu

  2. Department of Neurobiology, Key Laboratory on Neurodegenerative Disorders of Ministry of Education, Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, 100053, People’s Republic of China

    Yanan Hou & Tao Wu

  3. Department of Neurology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, 410008, People’s Republic of China

    Beisha Tang

Authors
  1. Ling-Li Zeng
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  2. Liang Xie
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  3. Hui Shen
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  4. Zhiguo Luo
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  5. Peng Fang
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  6. Yanan Hou
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  7. Beisha Tang
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  8. Tao Wu
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  9. Dewen Hu
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Tao Wu or Dewen Hu.

Ethics declarations

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Xuanwu Hospital’s Medical Research Ethical Committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Funding

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation of China (61503397, 61420106001, 61375111, and 61375034) and National High-tech Program of China (2012AA011601).

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Zeng, LL., Xie, L., Shen, H. et al. Differentiating Patients with Parkinson’s Disease from Normal Controls Using Gray Matter in the Cerebellum. Cerebellum 16, 151–157 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-016-0781-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-016-0781-1

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