Altered Functional Connectivity in the Motor and Prefrontal Cortex for Children With Down's Syndrome: An fNIRS Study

Children with Down's syndrome (DS) might exhibit disrupted brain functional connectivity in the motor and prefrontal cortex. To inspect the alterations in brain activation and functional connectivity for children with DS, the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) method was applied to e...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in human neuroscience 2020-02, Vol.14, p.6-6
Main Authors: Xu, Shi-Yang, Lu, Feng-Mei, Wang, Meng-Yun, Hu, Zhi-Shan, Zhang, Juan, Chen, Zhi-Yi, Armada-da-Silva, Paulo A S, Yuan, Zhen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brain
Brain architecture
brain connectivity
Caregivers
Children
cognition
Cognitive ability
Cortex (motor)
Down's syndrome
Electroencephalography
fNIRS
Functional morphology
Human Neuroscience
Infrared spectroscopy
Keyboards
Medical imaging
Neural networks
Prefrontal cortex
Reaction time task
Sensors
Software
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Children with Down's syndrome (DS) might exhibit disrupted brain functional connectivity in the motor and prefrontal cortex. To inspect the alterations in brain activation and functional connectivity for children with DS, the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) method was applied to examine the brain activation difference in the motor and prefrontal cortex between the DS and typically developing (TD) groups during a fine motor task. In addition, small-world analysis based on graph theory was also carried out to characterize the topological organization of functional brain networks. Interestingly, behavior data demonstrated that the DS group showed significantly long reaction time and low accuracy as compared to the TD group ( < ). More importantly, significantly reduced brain activations in the frontopolar area, the pre-motor, and the supplementary motor cortex ( < ) were identified in the DS group compared with the TD group. Meanwhile, significantly high global efficiency ( ) and short average path length ( ) were also detected for the DS group. This pilot study illustrated that the disrupted connectivity of frontopolar area, pre-motor, and supplementary motor cortex might be one of the core mechanisms associated with motor and cognitive impairments for children with DS. Therefore, the combination of the fNIRS technique with functional network analysis may pave a new avenue for improving our understanding of the neural mechanisms of DS.
ISSN:1662-5161
1662-5161
DOI:10.3389/fnhum.2020.00006