Sex differences in grey matter networks in dementia with Lewy bodies

Annegret Habich; Javier Oltra; Christopher G Schwarz; Scott A Przybelski; Ketil Oppedal; Anna Inguanzo; Frédéric Blanc; Afina W Lemstra; Jakub Hort; Eric Westman; Val J Lowe; Bradley F Boeve; Thomas Dierks; Dag Aarsland; Kejal Kantarci; Daniel Ferreira

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2519935/v1

Sex differences in grey matter networks in dementia with Lewy bodies

Res Sq [Preprint]. 2023 Jan 30:rs.3.rs-2519935. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2519935/v1.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Division of Clinical Geriatrics, Center for Alzheimer Research, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
² Medical Psychology Unit, Department of Medicine, Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
³ Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA.
⁴ Quantitative Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, US.
⁵ Center for Age-Related Medicine, Stavanger University Hospital, Stavanger, Norway.
⁶ Day Hospital of Geriatrics, Memory Resource and Research Centre (CM2R) of Strasbourg, Department of Geriatrics, Hopitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
⁷ Department of Neurology and Alzheimer Center, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
⁸ Motol University Hospital, Prague, Czech Republic.
⁹ Department of Neurology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA.
¹⁰ University Hospital of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Bern, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
¹¹ Department of Old Age Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.

Abstract

Objectives: Sex differences permeate many aspects of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), including epidemiology, pathogenesis, disease progression, and symptom manifestation. However, less is known about potential sex differences in patterns of neurodegeneration in DLB. Here, we test whether grey matter networks also differ between female and male DLB patients. To assess the specificity of these sex differences to DLB, we additionally investigate sex differences in healthy controls (HCs).

Methods: A total of 119 (68.7 ± 8.4 years) male and 45 female (69.9 ± 9.1 years) DLB patients from three European centres and the Mayo Clinic were included in this study. Additionally, we included 119 male and 45 female age-matched HCs from the Mayo Clinic. Grey matter volumes of 58 cortical, subcortical, cerebellar, and pontine brain regions derived from structural magnetic resonance images were corrected for age, intracranial volume, and centre. Sex-specific grey matter networks for DLB patients and HCs were constructed by correlating each pair of brain regions. Network properties of the correlation matrices were compared between sexes and groups. Additional analyses were conducted on W-scored data to identify DLB-specific findings.

Results: Networks of male HCs and male DLB patients were characterised by a lower nodal strength compared to their respective female counterparts. In comparison to female HCs, the grey matter networks of male HCs showed a higher global efficiency, modularity, and a lower number of modules. None of the global and nodal network measures showed significant sex differences in DLB.

Conclusions: The disappearance of sex differences in the structural grey matter networks of DLB patients compared to HCs may indicate a sex-dependent network vulnerability to the alpha-synuclein pathology in DLB. Future studies might investigate whether the differences in structural network measures are associated with differences in cognitive scores and clinical symptoms between the sexes.

Keywords: dementia with Lewy bodies; grey matter networks; sex differences.

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Preprint

Abstract

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