Frances-Catherine Quevenco1, Jiri van Bergen1, Xu Li2, Anton F. Gietl1, Valerie Treyer1,3, Rafael Meyer1, Sandra E. Leh1, Alfred Buck3, Roger Nitsch1, Peter C. M. van Zijl2, Christoph Hock1, and Paul G. Unschuld1
1Psychiatric Research, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2F.M. Kirby center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States, 3Division of Nuclear Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
To investigate early stages of preclinical Alzheimer’s, this
study investigates the functional connectivity of 25 cognitively healthy
elderly participants (“super agers”) in relation to cortical iron (using QSM)
and cortical amyloid-beta load (18F-Flutemetamol PET). Functional connectivity analysis with the
posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) as a seed found significant regional and
temporal overlaps in primary DMN regions for groups with high iron and high
amyloid. Despite the network synchronicities, a contrast between high iron and
high amyloid networks found significant FC differences between the PCC,
precuneus, hippocampus and parahippocampus which are DMN connections known to
be affected by Aß-burden.
