Qi Hongzhi

The abnormality of frontal-parietal controlsystem in Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a serious neurodegenerative disorder characterized by aphasia, apraxia and dysfunction of executive or working memory. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an emerging technology which has been widely used in the brain and neurological diseases research. It was found that the brain had some large-scale networks by using fMRI technology, such as sensorimotor, default mode (DM), dorsal attention, salience (SAL) and executive control (EC) network. EC and SAL were sub-networks of frontal-parietal control system, primarily involved in working memory, executive function, salience process. These networks were closely related to the function damage in AD. Previous studies found that the functional connectivity of some large-scale networks were injured by AD especially in default mode network. However, the AD-related alterations in frontal-parietal control system were not completely clear. Therefore, study using different strategies are needed to better portray spatial topology of frontal-parietal system change.