Task-induced subjective fatigue and resting-state striatal connectivity following traumatic brain injury

DOI

Background: People with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often experience fatigue, but an understanding of the neural underpinnings of fatigue following TBI is still lacking. This study used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to examine associations between functional connectivity (FC) changes and task-induced changes in subjective fatigue in people with moderate-severe TBI. Methods: Sixteen people with moderate-severe TBI and 17 matched healthy controls (HC) performed an adaptive N-back task (working memory task) to induce cognitive fatigue. Before and after the task they rated their state fatigue level and underwent rs-fMRI. Seed-to-voxel analyses with seeds in areas involved in cognitive fatigue, namely the striatum and default mode network (DMN) including, medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, were performed. Results: The adaptive N-back task was effective in inducing fatigue in both groups. Subjective task-induced fatigue was positively associated with FC between striatum and precuneus in people with TBI, while there was a negative association in HC. In contrast, subjective task-induced fatigue was negatively associated with FC between striatum and cerebellum in the TBI group, while there was no association in HC. Similar associations between task-induced subjective fatigue and DMN FC were found across the groups. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the subjective experience of fatigue was linked to DMN connectivity in both groups and was differently associated with striatal connectivity in people with moderate-severe TBI compared to HC. Defining fatigue-induced neuronal network changes is pertinent to the development of treatments that target abnormal neuronal activity after TBI.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/TWMP7M
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/TWMP7M
Provenance
Creator Bruijel, J. ORCID logo; Quaedflieg, C.W.E.M. ORCID logo; Otto, T. ORCID logo; van de Ven, V. ORCID logo; Stapert, S.Z. ORCID logo; van Heugten, C. ORCID logo; Vermeeren, A. ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor faculty data manager FPN; Bruijel, J.
Publication Year 2022
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University); Bruijel, J. (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type fMRI data; Dataset
Format text/csv
Size 2914; 24990; 6734
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences