Altered insula modulation during salience processing in chronic spinal cord injury: A functional magnetic resonance...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Rehabilitation Medicine

Background:

• Executive functions, including interference control, are vital for daily activities.
• Spinal cord injury (SCI) can lead to executive function deficits, but neural underpinnings are unclear.
• Understanding these neural mechanisms is crucial for comprehensive SCI assessment and rehabilitation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural correlates of interference control in individuals with chronic spinal cord injury (SCI).
• To compare cognitive performance and brain activity during an interference control task between SCI patients and healthy controls.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan 26 individuals with chronic SCI and 26 controls.
• Participants completed the Flanker task, a measure of interference control, under congruent, incongruent, and neutral conditions.
• Statistical analyses included linear mixed-effects models for performance and general linear models for brain imaging data.

Main Results:

• Individuals with SCI performed significantly worse on the Flanker task compared to controls.
• A significant interaction between group and condition was observed, with SCI patients showing lower performance in the neutral condition.
• Altered brain activity was found in the left insula and right precuneus in SCI patients, particularly in response to perceptual conflict.

Conclusions:

• Spinal cord injury is associated with altered interference control and distinct neural activity patterns in regions involved in salience processing.
• The insula's role in supporting cognitive processing appears diminished in individuals with SCI.
• These findings highlight the need for routine cognitive assessments in SCI patients to capture these functional changes.