Resting-state FMRI In Patients With Chronic Migraine

Objective: Chronic migraine is a type of migraine with features of recurrent attacks of throbbing pain on 15 or more days per month for more than three months associated with neurological,gastrointestinal and autonomic symptoms.Previous studies have provided mounting evidence on structural and functional abnormalities in the brains of patients with migraine.However,few studies have focused on the functional abnormalities in patients with chronic migraine.Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging reflects the brain activity on the baseline and may provide a clue to the nosogenesis of chronic migraine.In the current study,we employed a data-driven method,regional homogeneity(ReHo),to compare the local features of spontaneous brain activity in patients with chronic migraine with those in healthy controls during the resting state.Methods: Twenty patients with chronic migraine and 20 gender-,ageand education-matched healthy volunteers were involved in this study.Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging(rs-fMRI)and regional homogeneity(ReHo)analysis were employed to investigate the resting-state conditions,respectively,in chronic migraine patients and healthy controls.Data preprocessing and processing were performed by using DPARSFA 2.2 in the Matlab R2010 a operating environment.REST was applied for statistical analysis in Matlab R2010 a.For patients with chronic migraine and the healthy controls,a one-sample t-test(P<0.001,Alphasim corrected)was performed to check the default mode network(DMN)of each group.Then,a two-sample t-test(P < 0.05,Alphasim corrected)was performed to compare the differences between the two groups.Finally,analysis was performed to investigate the correlation of brain dysfunction in chronic migraine patients with disease duration,attack frequency and visual analogue scale(VAS)scores.Results: Compared with healthy controls,patients with chronic migraine showed a significant increase in ReHo values in the anterior cingulate cortex(ACC)and a significant decrease in left basal ganglia(BG)and right cerebellum(P<0.05,Alphasim corrected).In addition,we found that ReHo values were not significantly correlated with the duration of chronic migraine,attack frequency or VAS scores in ACC,left basal ganglia and right cerebellum.Conclusions: In the current study,we applied the ReHo method to investigate the abnormal resting-state conditions and to provide evidence for functional abnormalities in patients with chronic migraine during the resting state.The resting-state functional abnormalities of regions that we found may be associated with structural and functional impairments in pain processing in patients with chronic migraine.This may provide proactive diagnostic and prophylactic treatment strategies for patients with chronic migraine.