Purpose

Patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) undergo multiple gadolinium-based contrast agent injections across their lifespan to enhance signal intensity of the intestinal wall and differentiate active from quiescent inflammatory disease. Thus, CD patients are prone to gadolinium accumulation in the brain and represent a non-neurological population to explore gadolinium-related brain toxicity. Possible effects are expected to be greater on the cerebellar network due to the high propensity of the dentate nucleus to accumulate gadolinium. Herein, we provide a whole-brain network analysis of resting-state fMRI dynamics in long-term quiescent CD patients with normal renal function and MRI evidence of gadolinium deposition in the brain.

Methods

Fifteen patients with CD and 16 healthy age- and gender-matched controls were enrolled in this study. Relevant resting-state networks (RSNs) were identified using independent component analysis (ICA) from functional magnetic resonance imaging data. An unpaired two-sample t test (with age and sex as nuisance variables) was used to investigate between different RSNs. Clusters were determined by using threshold-free cluster enhancement and a family-wise error corrected cluster significance threshold of p < 0.05.

Results

Patients showed significantly decreased resting-state functional connectivity (p < 0.05, FWE corrected) of several regions of the right frontoparietal (FPR) and the dorsal attention (DAN) RSNs. No differences between the two groups were found in the functional connectivity maps of all the other RSNs, including the cerebellar network.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest a non-significant impact of gadolinium deposition on within-network cerebellar functional connectivity of long-term quiescent CD patients.

中文翻译：

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克罗恩病患者小脑中deposition沉积的网络内大脑连通性。

目的

患有克罗恩氏病（CD）的患者在其整个生命周期内都要接受多次基于g的造影剂注射，以增强肠壁的信号强度，并使活性物质与静态炎症性疾病区分开。因此，CD患者倾向于在大脑中积累accumulation，并且代表非神经病人群来探索与-相关的脑毒性。由于齿状核蓄积g的倾向很高，因此可能对小脑网络产生更大的影响。在此，我们提供了具有正常肾功能的长期静止CD患者的静止状态fMRI动态的全脑网络分析，以及脑中g沉积的MRI证据。

方法

这项研究纳入了15位CD患者和16位年龄和性别匹配的健康对照者。使用独立成分分析（ICA）从功能磁共振成像数据中识别出相关的静止状态网络（RSN）。使用未配对的两样本t检验（年龄和性别作为令人讨厌的变量）来调查不同RSN之间的差异。通过使用无阈值聚类增强和族错误校正的聚类显着性阈值p  <0.05确定聚类。

结果

患者显示 右额前额叶（FPR）和背侧注意（DAN）RSNs的多个区域的静息状态功能连通性明显降低（p <0.05，FWE校正）。在所有其他RSN（包括小脑网络）的功能连接图中，两组之间没有差异。

结论

我们的研究结果表明of沉积对长期静止CD患者的网络内小脑功能连接性无显着影响。