Functional changes in the salience network of patients with amnesic mild cognitive impairment before and after repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

Abstract Background Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is considered to be the prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The precuneus (PCUN) may be an imaging marker for monitoring the progression of AD. Meanwhile, cognitive impairment in AD patients is closely related to functional connectivity (FC) changes in the salience network (SN). We hypothesize that there are specific neuroimaging biomarkers in the SN and that FC changes in aMCI patients after repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) intervention are associated with cognitive function. The purpose of this study was to first investigate the pattern of functional changes in aMCI patients and healthy controls (HCs) and then compare the functional changes in aMCI patients before and after rTMS targeting to PCUN and its correlation with cognitive function. Methods Thirty‐six HCs and 61 aMCIs were recruited for our study. Eleven people in the aMCI group received rTMS intervention 5 days a week for 4 weeks. Using the right anterior insula as the seed‐of‐interest, we first compared FC changes in HC and aMCI patients and then compared cognitive function in aMCI patients before and after rTMS. The above is the functional connection analysis of seed‐to‐voxel. Moreover, we investigated the FC changes in aMCI patients after rTMS intervention and its correlation with cognitive function. Results Compared with HC, the aMCI group showed altered FC in bilateral parahippocampal gyrus, bilateral inferior parietal lobule, left middle frontal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus. Moreover, rTMS at PCUN improved the cognitive function of aMCI patients, which was related to the altered FC in posterior cerebellar lobes (CPL). Conclusions Our findings suggest that rTMS targeting PCUN is a promising, noninvasive approach to ameliorating cognitive dysfunction in aMCI patients, and that this cognitive improvement is accompanied by brain connectivity modulation.