Higher inter-hemispheric homotopic connectivity in lifelong premature ejaculation patients: a pilot resting-state...

Lifelong premature ejaculation (PE) is one common male sexual dysfunction and is implicated in widespread structural and functional abnormalities of bilateral hemispheres. However, whether the inter-hemisphere functional connectivity (FC) of lifelong PE patients was altered still remain unclear.

Thirty-four lifelong PE patients and 30 healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled in this study and all underwent T1-weighted and resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) scan. The voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) measure and independent sample t-test were applied to examine the alterations of VMHC values in the patients relative to HCs with the significant threshold at P<0.05, false discovery rates corrected. Correlation analysis was adopted to calculate the relationships between the imaging results and clinical characteristics of patients (P<0.05, Bonferroni corrected). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to investigate the possible biomarkers for distinguishing the patients from the HCs using the VMHC values of inter-group differences.

The results revealed that compared with HCs, lifelong PE patients had higher VMHC values in the precentral gyrus (PG), primary somatosensory cortex (S1), supplementary motor area (SMA), precuneus, middle temporal cortex (MTC), superior temporal pole (STP), thalamus, caudate and middle cingulate cortex (MCC). Correlation analysis showed that the mean VMHC values in the S1 negatively correlated with intravaginal ejaculation latency time (IELT) in the patient group. Furthermore, the caudate revealed the well classification power from the ROC analysis.

The present study showed the abnormal inter-hemisphere interaction and integration of information involved in ejaculation inhibitory control, sensorimotor mediation and self-reference processing including the thalamus, caudate, MCC, widespread parietal cortex and temporal cortex in lifelong PE patients compared with HCs. Correlation analysis and ROC analysis revealed the importance of S1 and caudate in lifelong PE. Notably, the ROC result of caudate might show the core roles of caudate played in the pathophysiology of lifelong PE.