Brain network dynamics in people with visual snow syndrome

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Neurology
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Visual snow syndrome (VSS) is a neurological condition with poorly understood pathological mechanisms.
• Previous research has not fully elucidated the impact of VSS on brain network topology.
• High-resolution resting-state 7 Tesla MRI offers advanced insights into brain function.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the functional pathological mechanisms and brain network topology in VSS patients.
• To compare dynamic network measures between VSS patients and healthy controls.
• To correlate aberrant brain network dynamics with ocular motor deficits in VSS.

Main Methods:

• Utilized high-resolution resting-state 7 Tesla MRI on 40 VSS patients and 60 healthy controls.
• Calculated functional connectivity, global efficiency, modularity, local efficiency (LE), and eigenvector centrality using a dynamic approach.
• Correlated network measures with ocular motor metrics and analyzed nodal co-modularity.

Main Results:

• VSS patients demonstrated lower modularity, supramarginal centrality, and LE dynamics in occipital and parietal regions.
• Reduced LE dynamics in the lateral occipital cortex correlated with shortened prosaccade latencies in VSS patients.
• VSS brains showed decreased nodal co-modularity between occipital, parietal, motor, and temporal/frontal regions.

Conclusions:

• The VSS brain exhibits reduced dynamic variation in modularity and local efficiency, indicating less variable network segregation and local clustering.
• These findings suggest alterations in brain network dynamics are central to VSS pathophysiology.
• Further research into these network changes may inform VSS understanding and treatment strategies.