Abstract
Objective We sought to assess cortical function in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) using noninvasive neural signal recording.
Methods Resting-state magnetoencephalography was used to measure power fluctuations in neuronal oscillations from distributed cortical parcels in 24 patients with ALS and 24 healthy controls. A further 9 patients with primary lateral sclerosis and a group of 15 asymptomatic carriers of genetic mutations associated with ALS were also studied.
Results Increased functional connectivity, particularly from the posterior cingulate cortex, was demonstrated in both patient groups compared to healthy controls. Directionally similar patterns were also evident in the asymptomatic genetic mutation carrier group.
Conclusion Increased cortical functional connectivity elevation is a quantitative marker that reflects ALS pathology across its clinical spectrum, and may develop during the presymptomatic period. The amelioration of pathologic magnetoencephalography signals might be a marker sensitive enough to provide proof-of-principle in the development of future neuroprotective therapeutics.
Glossary
- AGC=
- asymptomatic gene mutation carrier;
- ALS=
- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis;
- FC=
- functional connectivity;
- ICA=
- independent component analysis;
- MEG=
- magnetoencephalography;
- PLS=
- primary lateral sclerosis;
- ROI=
- region of interest;
- rs-fMRI=
- resting-state fMRI;
- RSN=
- resting-state network
Footnotes
Go to Neurology.org/N for full disclosures. Funding information and disclosures deemed relevant by the authors, if any, are provided at the end of the article.
The Article Processing Charge was funded by Medical Research Council.
- Received September 10, 2017.
- Accepted in final form January 11, 2018.
- Copyright © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. on behalf of the American Academy of Neurology.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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