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NCNED MRI study

John Mac

Senior Member
Messages
321
Location
Liverpool UK
Interesting fMRI study under way at NCNED in Australia

The fMRI scans from 83 individuals, both CFS patients and normal controls, were successfully acquired. Leighton and Zack are focusing on analysis of this data and promising new results have already been found.

They have already submitted one scientific report that is currently under peer review and two additional manuscripts are under preparation.

Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/National-C...-and-Emerging-Diseases-NCNED-301252900007181/
 

Hutan

Senior Member
Messages
1,099
Location
New Zealand
There's a summary of the poster presented to the Organization for Human Brain Mapping Vancouver 2017 conference here:

https://ww5.aievolution.com/hbm1701/index.cfm?do=abs.pubSearchAbstracts
Disrupted default mode network dynamics in chronic fatigue syndrome. Submission number 3085.

So this is just for the resting state.

Our recent longitudinal MRI study suggested that CFS is a chronic illness with abnormal connections among brain regions and white matter (WM) deficits which continue to deteriorate post onset (Shan, et al., 2016).

The observed WM deficits could possibly affects the brain connectivity and results in disrupted brain networks. The default mode network (DMN) denotes regions that show higher activity during nonspecific baseline conditions than during a range of cognitive tasks and represents the control state of brain function (Raichle, et al., 2001).

The DMN is known to be involved in many seemingly different functions such as self-reference, emotion of one's self, thinking about others, and remembering the past and thinking about the future. The purpose of this study is to investigate if the brain DMN connectivity was disrupted in patients with CFS.

brain study.jpg


To me, it looks like there is an issue with the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC - the blue blob) as its connectivity with other parts of the brain at work in a resting state appears to be lower in people with CFS than in healthy controls.

However, I'm sceptical of this functional MRI stuff.

@Woolie
 

Dechi

Senior Member
Messages
1,454
Their publication was just released, according to their facebook page, but I can’t find the link to it.