Exploration of spontaneous brain activity abnormalities in high myopia patients using resting-state fMRI with...

High myopia (HM) is a common eye disorder which has become a public health problem globally. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that HM is associated with brain structural abnormalities, whereas the spontaneous brain activity changes in HM are not well studied.

30 HM patients and 31 healthy controls were included in this study. The altered spontaneous brain activity in HM patients and their relationships with disease durations were explored, using amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF), fractional ALFF (fALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo) methods based on resting-state functional MRI.

Compared with controls, HM patients showed significant increased ALFF in the left insula, hippocampus, increased fALFF in the right hippocampus, calcarine fissure, superior temporal gyrus, lingual gyrus, increased ReHo in the left middle frontal gyrus, calcarine fissure and right cingulate gyrus, and decreased ALFF, fALFF in the left inferior frontal gyrus (opercular part), left inferior parietal lobule respectively. Besides, the mean ALFF value of left hippocampus and the mean ReHo value of left middle frontal gyrus exhibited significantly positive correlations with disease duration, and the mean fALFF value of left inferior parietal lobule showed significantly negative correlations with disease duration.

HM patients associated with neural dysfunctions in the vision network, attention network and limbic system, which may implicate the presence of neurobiological changes involving deficits in sensorimotor, vision and limbic system in HM patients, providing early useful diagnostic biomarkers for HM as well.