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No evidence of altered resting-state brain functional connectivity between adults who stutter and adults who do not stutter
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Poster C67 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Qiming Yuan1, Gabriel Cler1,2, Charlie Wiltshire1,3, Kate E. Watkins1; 1University of Oxford, 2University of Washington, 3Bangor University
Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by difficulty in producing fluent speech. Brain imaging studies in people who stutter during both perceptibly fluent and dysfluent speech production have revealed abnormal activity in brain areas involved in speech motor control and sensory feedback, including the inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally, basal ganglia nuclei, supplementary motor cortex, the cerebellum, and auditory cortex. Diffusion-weighted imaging studies have consistently revealed disruptions to the white matter connections between these areas. In contrast, functional connectivity studies in people who stutter have produced rather inconsistent findings. These studies explore functional connectivity at rest removing the potential effects of task demands and performance on measures of brain activity, which may be particularly important in studies of people who stutter. We obtained resting-state functional MRI data sets at both high temporal and spatial resolution in 49 adults who stutter (AWS, 39 men and 10 women; age range 19-45 years) and 38 adults who do not stutter (AWNS, 27 men and 11 women; age range 19-44 years). 1125 echo-planar volumes with an in-plane resolution of 2 x 2 mm and 72 slices 2-mm thick were collected using a short TR (0.8 s). Participants were instructed to keep their eyes open and fixate a cross on a black screen. Individual resting-state datasets were first analysed by subject-level independent component analysis (ICA) using FSL MELODIC and cleaned using FIX to remove noise components. Group ICA was performed to extract 50 independent components (ICs, 13 signal, 37 noise). Dual regression analyses were carried out to extract subject-specific spatial maps of these components. Spatial maps were compared between the groups of AWS and AWNS using t-tests and nonparametric permutation tests, which included gender, age, and handedness as covariates. The decision criteria were set as p < 0.05 with threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE). A small cluster in the right lateral middle occipital cortex (cluster size = 2, minimum p = 0.0176) from the group comparison of the default mode network showed higher functional connectivity in AWS than AWNS. However, it did not survive after Bonferroni correction of multiple comparisons for the number of components analysed. Furthermore, because of the imbalanced gender ratio in this study, we performed a follow-up analysis on only male participants (39 men who stutter, 27 men who do not stutter). As for the main analysis, a small cluster in the right lateral middle occipital cortex (cluster size = 7, minimum p = 0.0084) from the group comparison of a default mode network IC showed higher connectivity in AWS compared with AWNS. This finding also does not survive after correction for multiple comparisons. In summary, with this large sample and high temporal resolution resting-state fMRI data, we found no evidence of altered resting-state brain connectivity between adults who stutter and adults who do not stutter. More targeted, hypothesis-driven analyses may be necessary to reveal abnormal resting-state connectivity in people who stutter. Alternatively, functional differences may only emerge during engagement in task in this population.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Meaning: Lexical Semantics