Cortex-wide topography of 1/f-exponent in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive and debilitating brain disorder. Besides the characteristic movement-related symptoms, the disease also causes decline in sensory and cognitive processing. The extent of symptoms and brain-wide projections of neuromodulators such as dopamine suggest that many brain regions are simultaneously affected in PD. To characterise brain-wide disease-related changes in neuronal function, we analysed resting state magnetoencephalogram (MEG) from two groups: PD patients and healthy controls. Besides standard spectral analysis, we quantified the aperiodic components (κ, λ) of the neural activity by fitting a power law κ/f(λ) – f is the frequency, κ and λ are the fitting parameters—to the MEG power spectrum and studied its relationship with age and Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). Consistent with previous results, the most significant spectral changes were observed in the high theta/low-alpha band (7–10 Hz) in all brain regions. Furthermore, analysis of the aperiodic part of the spectrum showed that in all but frontal regions λ was significantly larger in PD patients than in control subjects. Our results indicate that PD is associated with significant changes in aperiodic activity across the whole neocortex. Surprisingly, even early sensory areas showed a significantly larger λ in patients than in healthy controls. Moreover, λ was not affected by the Levodopa medication. Finally, λ was positively correlated with patient age but not with UPDRS-III. Because λ is closely associated with excitation-inhibition balance, our results propose new hypotheses about neural correlates of PD in cortical networks.