Search bioRxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2022.01.16.476492

A Multisite and Multimodal Comparative Study of Cerebellar Connectome Between Multiple Sclerosis and Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorders

Yang, Y.·Li, J.·Li, Z.·Liu, Y.·Wang, J.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The cerebellum has been increasingly recognized to play key roles in the pathology of multiple sclerosis (MS) and spectrum disorders (NMOSD), two main demyelinating diseases with similar clinical presentations. Despite accumulating evidence from neuroimaging research for cerebellar volumetric alterations in the diseases, however, there have been no network-based studies examining convergent and divergent alterations in cerebellar connectome between MS and NMOSD. This multisite and multimodal study examined common and specific alterations in within-cerebellar coordination and cerebello-cerebral communication between MS and NMOSD by retrospectively collecting structural and resting-state functional MRI data from 208 MS patients, 200 NMOSD patients and 228 healthy controls (HCs) in seven sites in China. Morphological brain networks were constructed by estimating interregional similarity in cortical thickness and functional brain networks were formed by calculating interregional temporal synchronization in functional signals. After identifying cerebellar modular architecture and based on prior cerebral cytoarchitectonic classification and functional partition, within-cerebellar and cerebello-cerebral morphological and functional connectivity were compared among the MS, NMOSD and HC groups. Five modules were identified within the cerebellum including Primary Motor A (PMA), Primary Motor B (PMB), Primary Non-Motor (PNM), Secondary Motor (SM) and Secondary Non-Motor (SNM) modules. Compared with the HCs, the MS and NMOSD patients exhibited both increases and decreases in within-cerebellar morphological connectivity that were mainly involved in the PMA, PMB and SNM. Particularly, the two patient groups showed a common altered pattern characterized by decreases between the PMA and SNM, both of which were more densely connected with the PMB. For cerebello-cerebral morphological connectivity, widespread reductions were found in both patient groups for the SM and SNM with almost all cerebral cytoarchitectonic classes and functional systems while increases were observed only in the NMOSD patients for the PMB with cerebral areas involving motor and sensory domains. With regard to cerebellar functional connectivity, fewer alterations were observed in the patients that were all characterized by reductions and were mainly involved in cerebello-cerebral interactions between cerebellar motor modules and cerebral association cortex and high-order networks, particularly in the NMOSD patients. Cerebellar connectivity-based classification achieved around 60% accuracies to distinguish the three groups to each other with morphological connectivity as predominant features for differentiating the patients from controls while functional connectivity for discriminating the two diseases. Altogether, this study characterizes common and specific circuit dysfunctions of the cerebellum between MS and NMOSD, which provide novel insights into shared and unique pathophysiologic mechanisms underlying the two diseases.

Explore related subjects

neurosciencePreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yang, Y., Li, J., Li, Z., Liu, Y., Wang, J.. 2022-01-20. A Multisite and Multimodal Comparative Study of Cerebellar Connectome Between Multiple Sclerosis and Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.16.476492

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Same Movements, Different Skills: How Context Shapes Learning in Humans and Neural Networks

What determines whether experiences are integrated into shared representations or split? Motor skill learning offers a revealing test: when two tasks require an identical sequence of movements, both intuition and theory suggest that practice in one should generalize to the other. Yet we find that changing context can make identical movements different skills. In simple recurrent networks trained on the same sequence across contexts, splitting was greatest when strong contextual inputs coincided with a high initial weight scale; neither alone sufficed. Greater representational separation coincided with separate context-specific learning curves. Humans practicing the same finger sequence while alternating between two performance-irrelevant contexts likewise exhibited context-specific curves, rather than the single continuous trajectory observed when practicing in a single context. State-space modeling favored split learning states in humans and very weakly coupled states in the most context-dependent networks. These findings have broader implications for understanding how learning generalizes across contexts.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Postpartum resource scarcity reshapes maternal care, offspring prioritization, and the steroid-sensitive medial preoptic area

Parental care requires balancing offspring needs with environmental constraints, yet how resource scarcity alters the organization of maternal responses remains poorly understood. Here, we examined maternal behavior, offspring prioritization, and steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix organization in postpartum rats exposed to limited bedding and nesting (LBN) or control conditions with ample nesting materials. LBN increased pup-directed and reduced self-directed behaviors but also increased behavioral entropy, a measure of behavioral fragmentation, indicating less predictable caregiving sequences. LBN dams preferentially retrieved male pups first, whereas control dams preferentially retrieved females first. LBN also increased the proportion of pup-investigation time directed toward males compared with controls. In offspring on postnatal day 10, corticosterone was elevated in female but not male LBN pups, a pattern that paralleled the maternal male bias. To identify associated neurobiological changes, we assessed steroid receptors and extracellular matrix organization in the medial preoptic area (mPOA), a key region for maternal behavior. LBN increased numbers of estrogen receptor (ER)- and androgen receptor (AR)-immunoreactive cells, reduced perineuronal net (PNN) abundance, and decreased receptor-positive cell enwrapment. Because PNNs constrain structural plasticity, these findings suggest that the postpartum environment alters the organization of steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix, potentially modulating experience-dependent plasticity in neurosteroid-sensitive circuits. In sum, LBN increases the levels of maternal engagement while reshaping its temporal organization and allocation, accompanied by selective remodeling of steroid-sensitive preoptic architecture. Therefore, maternal adaptation to adversity may be better understood as changes in caregiving allocation strategies rather than a simple gain or loss of maternal care.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

The Computational Grammar of Human Behaviour in a Biological Environment

Human behaviour unfolds as an extended stream of spontaneous actions shaped by environmental demands and the agent's goals. The organisation of these actions, situated between setting abstract goals and concrete movement execution, remains poorly characterised. Here, we introduce DynaClade, an unsupervised temporal action segmentation algorithm for human full-body motion capture data, and apply it to freely moving participants navigating ecologically realistic risky foraging environments in virtual reality. DynaClade identifies discrete actions whose kinematic characteristics and spatial distributions correspond to environmental affordances, supporting the validity of the approach. Among these actions, we discovered a hitherto undescribed movement pattern defined by increased body sway without locomotion. Action sequences were highly non-random and showed clear history dependence beyond first-order Markov structure, most of which was explained by a second-order prediction. This higher-order structure was well captured in a hidden Markov model, in which some of the observed actions were associated with more than one latent state. Each of these latent states corresponded to the same action in a distinct action context. These findings suggest that spontaneous human actions are predominantly selected based on the current action and context, rather than following pre-planned or habitually assembled sequences.

neuroscience↗