Functional-structural large-scale brain networks are correlated with neurocognitive impairment in acute mild traumatic brain injury.

Background: This study was conducted to investigate topological changes in large-scale functional connectivity (FC) and structural connectivity (SC) networks in acute mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and determine their potential relevance to cognitive impairment. Methods: Seventy-one patients with acute mTBI (29 males, 42 females, mean age 43.54 years) from Nanjing First Hospital and 57 matched healthy controls (HC) (33 males, 24 females, mean age 46.16 years) from the local community were recruited in this prospective study. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) were acquired within 14 days (mean 3.29 days) after the onset of mTBI. Then, large-scale FC and SC networks with 116 regions from the automated anatomical labeling (AAL) brain atlas were constructed. Graph theory analysis was used to analyze global and nodal metrics. Finally, correlations were assessed between topological properties and neurocognitive performances evaluated by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Bonferroni correction was performed out for multiple comparisons in all involved analyses. Results: Compared with HC, acute mTBI patients had a higher normalized clustering coefficient ( Conclusions: Our findings suggested that large-scale FC and SC network changes, higher correlation between FC and SC and cognitive impairment can be detected in the acute stage of mTBI. These network aberrances may be a compensatory mechanism for cognitive impairment in acute mTBI patients.