Disrupted white matter network connectivity associated with cognitive declines in psychogenic erectile dysfunction

Abstract

Abstract Increasing neuroimaging studies have demonstrated abnormalities of cerebral structural changes in psychogenic erectile dysfunction (pED). Despite the abnormal brain changes involving cognitive processing in pED, pED patients suffer from cognitive dysfunction by screening in standard neurocognitive tests remain elusive. This study aimed to explore the alterations of structural brain networks associated with cognitive impairments in pED. We firstly used different machine learning methods to probe discriminative brain maps between 40 pED patients and 33 healthy controls (HCs) for diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. Then, we identified the important features of pED patients to analyze the abnormal structural brain networks in association with cognitive functions compared to HCs. From 26896 features of DTI data, 24 important features were identified by K-Nearest Neighbor classification with a satisfactory accuracy (78%). According to the results of the machine learning analysis, we found that pED patients showed higher FA values between left transverse temporal sulcus and left supramarginal gyrus (p = 0.001, Bonferroni corrected), and lower FA values between left suborbital sulcus and left para-hippocampal part of the medial occipito-temporal gyrus in ED patients than HCs (p < 0.001, Bonferroni corrected). Furthermore, the increased FA between left transverse temporal sulcus and left supramarginal gyrus was observed to be negatively associated with erectile dysfunction (p < 0.001) and impaired delayed memory (p = 0.028). Overall, our findings provide new insights into white matter network alterations associated with impaired cognitive functions in pED, which may provide a potential biomarker for treating pED.