Patients with dementia with Lewy bodies display a signature alteration of their cognitive connectome
2025

Cognitive Connectome Changes in Dementia with Lewy Bodies

Sample size: 104 publication 10 minutes Evidence: high

Author Information

Author(s): Yanez-Perez Roraima, Garcia-Cabello Eloy, Habich Annegret, Cedres Nira, Diaz-Galvan Patricia, Abdelnour Carla, Toledo Jon B., Barroso José, Ferreira Daniel

Primary Institution: Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Hypothesis

We hypothesized prominent alterations in the cognitive connectome of DLB patients in comparison with HC, particularly involving attention, executive, and visual domains.

Conclusion

The cognitive connectome of DLB patients shows a loss of segregation, leading to a loss of cognitive specialization.

Supporting Evidence

  • DLB patients showed significantly lower performance in all cognitive domains compared with healthy controls.
  • DLB had more years of education than AD.
  • DLB patients had a higher global efficiency and lower transitivity than healthy controls.

Takeaway

This study looked at how the brain connections of people with dementia with Lewy bodies are different from healthy people and those with Alzheimer's, showing that their brain connections are less specialized.

Methodology

We built cognitive connectomes for DLB, healthy controls, and AD using correlations among 24 cognitive measures and compared them using global and nodal graph measures.

Potential Biases

Diagnosis of DLB was entirely clinical, while the underlying Lewy body-related pathology can only be confirmed post-mortem.

Limitations

The availability of data was not even across cognitive measures, which may have led to the underrepresentation of some cognitive domains.

Participant Demographics

DLB group had 86% men and an average age of 71.9 years with 16.3 years of education.

Statistical Information

P-Value

p<0.001

Confidence Interval

95%

Statistical Significance

p<0.05

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1038/s41598-024-84946-4

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