White Matter Microstructural Alterations in Patients with Neuropathic Pain After Spinal Cord Injury: a Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study

Overview

Journal Front Neurol

Specialty Neurology

Date 2023 Sep 11

PMID 37693753

Authors

Dong Dong

Koichi Hosomi

Nobuhiko Mori

Yoshi-Ichiro Kamijo

Yohei Furotani

Daisuke Yamagami

Yu-Ichiro Ohnishi

Yoshiyuki Watanabe

Takeshi Nakamura

Fumihiro Tajima

Haruhiko Kishima

Youichi Saitoh

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Background: Through contrastive analysis, we aimed to identify the white matter brain regions that show microstructural changes in patients with neuropathic pain (NP) after spinal cord injury (SCI).

Methods: We categorized patients with SCI into NP ( = 30) and non-NP ( = 15) groups. We extracted diffusion tensor maps of fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean (MD), axial (AD), and radial (RD) diffusivity. A randomization-based method in tract-based spatial statistics was used to perform voxel-wise group comparisons among the FA, MD, AD, and RD for nonparametric permutation tests.

Results: Atlas-based analysis located significantly different regions ( < 0.05) in the appointed brain atlas. Compared to the non-NP group, the NP group showed higher FA in the posterior body and splenium of the corpus callosum and higher AD in the corpus callosum, internal capsule, corona radiata, posterior thalamic radiation, sagittal stratum, external capsule, cingulum, fornix/stria terminalis, superior longitudinal fasciculus, and uncinate fasciculus.

Conclusion: The results demonstrated that compared with the non-NP group, NP pathogenesis after SCI was potentially related to higher values in FA that are associated with microstructural changes in the posterior body and splenium of the corpus callosum, which could be regarded as central sensitization or network hyperexcitability.

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