Lei Jiang1, Zhihao Li1, Claire
Coles2, Mary Lynch2, Xiaoping Hu1
1Department of Biomedical
Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,
GA, United States; 2Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral
Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, United States
Children and adolescents prenatally exposed to cocaine are at high risk not only for attention/arousal dysregulation and possible inefficiencies in some cognitive functions, but also for problems such as antisocial behavior, substance abuse, and emotional disorders. Because functional brain networks detected in resting-state fMRI have a small-world architecture that reflects a robust functional organization of the brain, here we examined whether this functional organization is disrupted in prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) by employing a wavelet analysis method. The results show that dysfunctional integrations occur in the brains of PCE individuals during the resting state. Differences between sub-bands were also observed in the small-world analysis. Our findings highlight the need to consider different frequency bands and the usefulness of wavelets in functional connectivity analyses of resting state fMRI.
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