Characterizing structure-function coupling in subjective memory complaints of preclinical Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Background

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is recognized as an early phase in the progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Objective

To explore the abnormal patterns of morphological and functional connectivity coupling (MC-FC coupling) and their potential diagnostic significance in SCD.

Methods

The data of 52 individuals with SCD and 51 age-gender-education matched healthy controls (HC) who underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and high-resolution 3D T₁-weighted imaging were retrieved to build the MC and FC of gray matter. Support vector machine (SVM) methods were used for differentiating between SCD and HC.

Results

SCD individuals exhibited MC-FC decoupling in the frontoparietal network compared with HC (p = 0.002, 5000 permutations). Using these adjusted MC-FC coupling metrics, SVM analysis achieved 74.76% accuracy, 64.71% sensitivity, and 92.31% specificity (p < 0.001, 5000 permutations). Additionally, the stronger MC-FC coupling of the left inferior temporal gyrus (r = 0.294, p = 0.034) and right posterior cingulate gyrus (r = 0.372, p = 0.007) in SCD individuals was positively correlated with subjective memory complaint performance.

Conclusions

The findings of this study provide insight into the idiosyncratic feature of brain organization underlying SCD from the prospective of MC-FC coupling and highlight the potential of MC-FC coupling for the identification of the preclinical stage of AD.