Structural and Functional Deficits in Patients with Poststroke Dementia: A Multimodal MRI Study

Although many neuroimaging studies have reported structural and functional abnormalities in the brains of patients with cognitive impairments following stroke, little is known about the pattern of such brain reorganization in poststroke dementia (PSD). The present study was aimed at investigating alterations in spontaneous brain activity and gray matter volume (GMV) in PSD patients. We collected T1-weighted and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 20 PSD patients, 24 poststroke nondementia (PSND) patients, and 21 well-matched normal controls (NCs). We compared the differences among the groups in GMV and the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF). Then, we evaluated the relationship between these brain measures and cognitive assessments and explored the possible distinguisher for PSD by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. PSD patients showed smaller GMV in the right superior temporal gyrus and lower fALFF values in the right inferior frontal gyrus than both PSND patients and NCs, but such differences were not observed between PSND patients and NCs. Moreover, GMV in the left medial prefrontal cortex showed a significant positive correlation with the Mini-Cog assessment in PSD patients, and GMV in the left CPL displayed the highest area under the ROC curve among all the features for classifying PSD versus PSND patients. Our findings suggest that PSD patients show dementia-specific structural and functional alteration patterns, which may help elucidate the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying PSD.