Irregular degree centrality in neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder patients with optic neuritis: A resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) is an autoimmune inflammatory disorder that causes significant changes in brain connectivity and visual impairment. Degree centrality (DC), a graph-based assessment of network organization was performed to explore the connectivity changes in NMOSD patients and their correlation with clinical consequences.Twenty-two NMOSD patients and 22 healthy controls (HC) were included. Participants underwent visual acuity examination and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. We first performed DC analysis to identify voxels that showed changes in whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) with other voxels. DC was calculated by the fMRI graph method and comparison between the two groups was done by two-sample t-test. GraphPad Prism was used to assess the association between DC changes and clinical consequences.Out of the 22 NMOSD patients, 7 (31.82%) had ON once while 15 (68.18%) had ON twice or more. Decreased DC value (P < 0.001) in the left frontal superior orbital gyrus (ORBsup), left angular gyrus (ANG) and right parietal superior gyrus (SPG) was found in NMOSD patients when compared with healthy controls respectively. Reduced visual acuity significantly correlated (R2 = 0.212, P = 0.040) with DC values in SPG while the frequency of ON significantly correlated (R2 = 0.04, P = 0.040) with DC values in the ANG in NMOSD patients.NMOSD patients experience neural network dysfunction which may be associated with their clinical implications.