Rehabilitation Response in Tremor- and Non-Tremor-Dominant Parkinson Disease: A Task-fMRI Study

Tremor-dominant (TD) and nontremor-dominant (NTD) Parkinson's disease (PD) showed different responses to rehabilitation. However, the neural mechanism behind this remains unclear.

This cohort study explores changes in motor function, brain activation, and functional connectivity following 2 weeks of rehabilitation in TD-PD and NTD-PD patients, respectively. A total of 11 TD-PD patients, 24 NTD-PD patients, and 21 age-matched healthy controls (HCs) were included. At baseline, all participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing the foot tapping task. Motor symptoms, gait, balance, and task-based fMRI were then evaluated in patients before and after rehabilitation.

Compared to HCs, TD-PD patients showed increased activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the right insula, and NTD-PD patients showed increased activations in the left postcentral gyrus and decreased within-cerebellar connectivity at baseline. Rehabilitation improved motor function in PD patients regardless of motor subtype. TD-PD patients showed increased recruitments of the sensorimotor cortex and the bilateral thalamus after rehabilitation, and NTD-PD patients showed increased cerebellar activation and within-cerebellar connectivity that was associated with better motor performance.

This study demonstrated that rehabilitation-induced brain functional reorganization varied by motor subtypes in PD, which may have important implications for making individualized rehabilitation programs.

ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: ChiCTR1900020771.