Functional alteration due to structural damage is network dependent: insight from multiple sclerosis

Little is known about how the brain's functional organization changes over time with respect to structural damage. Using multiple sclerosis as a model of structural damage, we assessed how much functional connectivity (FC) changed within and between preselected resting-state networks (RSNs) in 122 subjects (72 with multiple sclerosis and 50 healthy controls). We acquired the structural, diffusion, and functional MRI to compute functional connectomes and structural disconnectivity profiles. Change in FC was calculated by comparing each multiple sclerosis participant's pairwise FC to controls, while structural disruption (SD) was computed from abnormalities in diffusion MRI via the Network Modification tool. We used an ordinary least squares regression to predict the change in FC from SD for 9 common RSNs. We found clear differences in how RSNs functionally respond to structural damage, namely that higher-order networks were more likely to experience changes in FC in response to structural damage (default mode R2 = 0.160-0.207, P < 0.001) than lower-order sensory networks (visual network 1 R2 = 0.001-0.007, P = 0.157-0.387). Our findings suggest that functional adaptability to structural damage depends on how involved the affected network is in higher-order processing.