Decreased Functional Connectivity of Supplementary Motor Area Under Tactile Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: An fMRI Study

Xiaojun Xu¹, Hengyi Cao¹, Dan Long¹, Minming Zhang¹

PD is characterized by a large number of non-motor clinical features, among them the somatosensory deficit is a significant part. However, the exact neural mechanism of this impaired somatosensory function is still scarcely known. We used a method based on the graph theory to measure the functional connectivity of the somatosensory network activated by passively tactile stimulation. We found that SMA is the most important node of the abnormal tactile network for PD patients, which indicated that the dysfunction of SMA might be the key point of abnormal function of somatosensory networks in Parkinsonian brain.