Loss of Parietal Memory Network Integrity in Alzheimer's Disease

A functional brain network, termed the parietal memory network (PMN), has been shown to reflect the familiarity of stimuli in both memory encoding and retrieval. The function of this network has been separated from the commonly investigated default mode network (DMN) in both resting-state fMRI and task-activations. This study examined the deficit of the PMN in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients using resting-state fMRI and independent component analysis (ICA) and investigated its diagnostic value in identifying AD patients. The DMN was also examined as a reference network. In addition, the robustness of the findings was examined using different types of analysis methods and parameters. Our results showed that the integrity as an intrinsic connectivity network for the PMN was significantly decreased in AD and this feature showed at least equivalent predictive ability to that for the DMN. These findings were robust to varied methods and parameters. Our findings suggest that the intrinsic connectivity of the PMN is disrupted in AD and further call for considering the PMN and the DMN separately in clinical neuroimaging studies.