Alterations in regional homogeneity assessed by fMRI in patients with migraine without aura stratified by disease duration

The Journal of Headache and Pain

Research Article

Ling Zhao¹  Yulin Peng¹  Fanrong Liang¹  Fumei Wu¹  Xilin Dong¹  Qiyong Gong²  Jixin Liu³  Kai Yuan³  Jinbo Sun³  Wei Qin³ 

[1] Acupuncture and Tuina School, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 610075, Chengdu, Sichuan, China;Department of Radiology, The Center for Medical Imaging, Huaxi MR Research Center, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, 610041, Chengdu, Sichuan, China;Life Sciences Research Center, School of Life Sciences and Technology, Xidian University, 710071, Xi’an, Shanxi, China;

关键词: Migraine without aura;    Functional MRI;    Regional homogeneity;    Resting state;    Disease duration;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1129-2377-14-85

 received in 2013-07-29, accepted in 2013-10-04,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAdvanced neuroimaging approaches have been employed to prove that migraine was a central nervous system disorder. This study aims to examine resting-state abnormalities in migraine without aura (MWoA) patients stratified by disease duration, and to explore the neuroimaging markers for reflecting the disease duration.Methods40 eligible MWoA patients and 20 matched healthy volunteers were included in the study. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) analysis was used to identify the local features of spontaneous brain activity in MWoA patients stratified by disease duration, and analysis was performed to investigate the correlation of overlapped brain dysfunction in MWoA patients with different disease duration (long-term and short-term) and course of disease.ResultsCompared with healthy controls, MWoA patients with long-term disease duration showed comprehensive neuronal dysfunction than patients with short-term disease duration. In addition, increased average ReHo values in the thalamus, brain stem, and temporal pole showed significantly positive correlations with the disease duration. On the contrary, ReHo values were negatively correlated with the duration of disease in the anterior cingulate cortex, insula, posterior cingulate cortex and superior occipital gyrus.ConclusionsOur findings of progressive brain damage in relation to increasing disease duration suggest that migraine without aura is a progressive central nervous disease, and the length of the disease duration was one of the key reasons to cause brain dysfunction in MwoA patients. The repeated migraine attacks over time result in resting-state abnormalities of selective brain regions belonging to the pain processing and cognition. We predict that these brain regions are sensitive neuroimaging markers for reflecting the disease duration of migraine patients without aura.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zhao et al.; licensee Springer. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.