Language impairment in Parkinson’s disease: fMRI study of sentence reading comprehension

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Lubomira Novakova¹  Irena Rektorova¹  Martin Gajdos¹  Jana Markova²  Zsolt Csefalvay²  Peter Valkovic³  Zuzana Kosutzka³  Jana Svantnerova³  Alice Martinkovicova³ 

[1] Brain and Mind Research, Central European Institute of Technology, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia;Department of Communication Disorders, Faculty of Education, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia;Second Department of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia;

关键词: Parkinson’s disease;    language impairment;    sentence reading comprehension;    task fMRI;    functional connectivity;    striatum;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnagi.2023.1117473

 received in 2022-12-06, accepted in 2023-02-27,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Parkinson’s disease (PD) affects the language processes, with a significant impact on the patients’ daily communication. We aimed to describe specific alterations in the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences in patients with PD (PwPD) as compared to healthy controls (HC) and to identify the neural underpinnings of these deficits using a functional connectivity analysis of the striatum. A total of 20 patients PwPD and 15 HC participated in the fMRI study. We analyzed their performance of a Test of sentence comprehension (ToSC) adjusted for fMRI. A task-dependent functional connectivity analysis of the striatum was conducted using the psychophysiological interaction method (PPI). On the behavioral level, the PwPD scored significantly lower (mean ± sd: 77.3 ± 12.6) in the total ToSC score than the HC did (mean ± sd: 86.6 ± 8.0), p = 0.02, and the difference was also significant specifically for sentences with a non-canonical word order (PD-mean ± sd: 69.9 ± 14.1, HC-mean ± sd: 80.2 ± 11.5, p = 0.04). Using PPI, we found a statistically significant difference between the PwPD and the HC in connectivity from the right striatum to the supplementary motor area [SMA, (4 8 53)] for non-canonical sentences. This PPI connectivity was negatively correlated with the ToSC accuracy of non-canonical sentences in the PwPD. Our results showed disturbed sentence reading comprehension in the PwPD with altered task-dependent functional connectivity from the right striatum to the SMA, which supports the synchronization of the temporal and sequential aspects of language processing. The study revealed that subcortical-cortical networks (striatal-frontal loop) in PwPD are compromised, leading to impaired comprehension of syntactically complex sentences.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Novakova, Gajdos, Markova, Martinkovicova, Kosutzka, Svantnerova, Valkovic, Csefalvay and Rektorova.