Altered spreading of fast aperiodic brain waves relates to disease duration in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

To test the hypothesis that patients affected by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) show an altered spatio-temporal spreading of neuronal avalanches in the brain, and that this may related to the clinical picture.

We obtained the source-reconstructed magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals from thirty-six ALS patients and forty-two healthy controls. Then, we used the construct of the avalanche transition matrix (ATM) and the corresponding network parameter nodal strength to quantify the changes in each region, since this parameter provides key information about which brain regions are mostly involved in the spreading avalanches.

ALS patients presented higher values of the nodal strength in both cortical and sub-cortical brain areas. This parameter correlated directly with disease duration.

In this work, we provide a deeper characterization of neuronal avalanches propagation in ALS, describing their spatio-temporal trajectories and identifying the brain regions most likely to be involved in the process. This makes it possible to recognize the brain areas that take part in the pathogenic mechanisms of ALS. Furthermore, the nodal strength of the involved regions correlates directly with disease duration.

Our results corroborate the clinical relevance of aperiodic, fast large-scale brain activity as a biomarker of microscopic changes induced by neurophysiological processes.