Microstructural Abnormalities of White Matter Across Tourette Syndrome: A Voxel-Based Meta-Analysis of Fractional Anisotropy

Frontiers in Neurology

Hengyi Cao³  Naici Liu⁴  Su Lui⁴  Li Yao⁴  Bo Tao⁴  Qiyong Gong⁴  Wenjing Zhang⁴  Chengmin Yang⁴ 

[1] Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience, Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, Manhasset, NY, United States;Department of Radiology, Huaxi MR Research Center, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu, China;Division of Psychiatry Research, Zucker Hillside Hospital, Glen Oaks, NY, United States;Psychoradiology Research Unit of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Functional and Molecular Imaging Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu, China;

关键词: Tourette syndrome;    diffusion tensor imaging;    fractional anisotropy;    magnetic resonance imaging;    meta-analysis;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fneur.2021.659250

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Introduction: Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neuropsychiatric disorder with multiple motor and vocal tics whose neural basis remains unclear. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have demonstrated white matter microstructural alternations in TS, but the findings are inconclusive. In this study, we aimed to elucidate the most consistent white matter deficits in patients with TS.Method: By systematically searching online databases up to December 2020 for all DTI studies comparing fractional anisotropy (FA) between patients with TS and healthy controls (HCs), we conducted anisotropic effect size-signed differential mapping (AES-SDM) meta-analysis to investigate FA differences in TS, as well as performed meta-regression analysis to explore the effects of demographics and clinical characteristics on white matter abnormalities among TS.Results: A total of eight datasets including 168 patients with TS and 163 HCs were identified. We found that TS patients showed robustly decreased FA in the corpus callosum (CC) and right inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) compared with HCs. These two regions preserved significance in the sensitivity analysis. No regions of increased FA were reported. Meta-regression analysis revealed that age, sex, tic severity, or illness duration of patients with TS were not linearly correlated with decreased FA.Conclusion: Patients with TS display deficits of white matter microstructure in the CC and right ILF known to be important for interhemispheric connections as well as long association fiber bundles within one hemisphere. Because the results reported in the primary literature were highly variable, future investigations with large samples would be required to support the identified white matter changes in TS.

【 授权许可】

Unknown