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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 3|pp 4007—4023

Cortical thickness in Parkinson's disease: a coordinate-based meta-analysis

LiQin Sheng1, PanWen Zhao2, HaiRong Ma1, Joaquim Radua3,4,5, ZhongQuan Yi2, YuanYuan Shi2, JianGuo Zhong6, ZhenYu Dai7, PingLei Pan6
  • 1Department of Neurology, Kunshan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Kunshan, PR China
  • 2Department of Central Laboratory, The Yancheng School of Clinical Medicine of Nanjing Medical University, Yancheng, PR China
  • 3Imaging of Mood- and Anxiety-Related Disorders (IMARD) Group, Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), CIBERSAM, Barcelona, Spain
  • 4Early Psychosis: Interventions and Clinical-Detection (EPIC) Laboratory, Department of Psychosis Studies, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, London, UK
  • 5Centre for Psychiatric Research and Education, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 6Department of Neurology, The Yancheng School of Clinical Medicine of Nanjing Medical University, Yancheng, PR China
  • 7Department of Radiology, The Yancheng School of Clinical Medicine of Nanjing Medical University, Yancheng, PR China
* Equal contribution
Received: September 10, 2020Accepted: November 30, 2020Published: January 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202368

Copyright: © 2021 Sheng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common age-related neurodegenerative disease that affects the structural architecture of the cerebral cortex. Cortical thickness (CTh) via surface-based morphometry (SBM) analysis is a popular measure to assess brain structural alterations in the gray matter in PD. However, the results of CTh analysis in PD lack consistency and have not been systematically reviewed. We conducted a comprehensive coordinate-based meta-analysis (CBMA) of 38 CTh studies (57 comparison datasets) in 1,843 patients with PD using the latest seed-based d mapping software. Compared with 1,172 healthy controls, no significantly consistent CTh alterations were found in patients with PD, suggesting CTh as an unreliable neuroimaging marker for PD. The lack of consistent CTh alterations in PD could be ascribed to the heterogeneity in clinical populations, variations in imaging methods, and underpowered small sample sizes. These results highlight the need to control for potential confounding factors to produce robust and reproducible CTh results in PD.