Disrupted hypothalamic functional connectivity related to cognitive impairment after diffuse axonal injury

This study aims to investigate whether there is imaging evidence of disrupted hypothalamic functional connectivity (FC) in patients with diffuse axonal injury (DAI) and relationships with cognitive impairment. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired from acute patients with diagnosed DAI (n = 30) and healthy controls (HC) (n = 30). We first assessed hypothalamic FC with seed-based analysis. Furthermore, the lateral and medial hypothalamic seed was selected to show distinct functional connectivity in DAI. In addition, partial correlation was used to measure the clinical associations with the altered hypothalamic FC in DAI patients. Compared with HC, DAI group showed significantly increased hypothalamic FC with superior temporal gyrus, and the regions around the operculum. Furthermore, there was a significant negative correlation between the connectivity coefficient of hypothalamus to right and left superior temporal gyrus and the disability rating scale scores in DAI group. When the seed regions were divided into lateral and medial hypothalamus, except for increased connectivity of medial hypothalamus (P < .01 with correction), we more observed that decreased left lateral hypothalamic connectivity was positively correlated with mini-mental state examination (MMSE) scores. Our results suggest that there are alterations of hypothalamic FC in DAI and offer further understanding of clinical symptoms including related cognitive impairment.