Aberrant Circuitry Of The Visual Processing Area-stn-motor Cortex In Parkinson’s Disease With REM Sleep Behavior Disorder

Rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder(RBD) is a sleep disturbance that is primarily characterized by vivid dreams and motion control disorders, It is one of the non motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease(PD). The subthalamic nucleus(STN) integrates information and motor processing. We hypothesized that there may be abnormal functional connectivity in the visual processing area and motor cortex associated with the STN. To this end, 15 PD with no RBD(nPDR), 15 PD with RBD(PDR), 17 normal control(NCs) were recruited for our study. We performed a seed-based resting-state analysis of Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging(RS-fMRI) study to explore whole brain functional connectivity(FC) of the bilateral STN. The analysis revealed that the left STN exhibited significantly increased connectivity with the cuneus/precuneus, the bottom of the occipital lobe and the frontal lobe in the PDR group compared with the nPDR group. The cuneus/precuneus and the frontal lobe showed significant positive correlations in an analysis employing the REM sleep behavior disorder screening questionnaire(RBDSQ) in the PD with RBD group. In summary, the occurrence of PDR may be related to the aberrant functional connectivity in the visual processing area-STN-motor cortex network.