Neuroimaging studies on cognitive impairment due to cerebral small vessel disease

Abstract

Vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) is a major contributor to age-related dementing illnesses which imposes a tremendous burden on families and society. It is a heterogeneous group of brain disorders. However, cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) accounts for about 50%–70% of VCI, which represented a more homogeneous subtype of VCI. Advanced multimodal neuroimaging techniques like brain network connectome analyses are currently applied to explore the underlying mechanism of VCI. Some progress in the field of structural and functional brain network researches on a poststroke longitudinal CSVD cohort (Renji CSVD Cohort Study) was reported. Global and regional brain network characters were compared between patients with CSVD and healthy control. It suggested that distributed brain structural network disruption may play a pivot role in the cognitive decline. The results showed that brain structural network characters have distinctive differentiating capacity on the cognition of patients with CSVD.