TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2018//
TI  - Impaired rich club and increased local connectivity in children with traumatic brain injury: local support for the rich?
JO  - Human brain mapping
A1  - Verhelst, Helena
A1  - Vander Linden, Catharine
A1  - De Pauw, Toon
A1  - Vingerhoets, Guy
A1  - Caeyenberghs, Karen
SP  - 2800
EP  - 2811
VL  - 39
IS  - 7
N2  - Recent evidence has shown the presence of a "rich club" in the brain, which constitutes a core network of highly interconnected and spatially distributed brain regions, important for high-order cognitive processes. This study aimed to map the rich club organization in 17 young patients with moderate to severe TBI (15.71 ± 1.75 years) in the chronic stage of recovery and 17 age- and gender-matched controls. Probabilistic tractography was performed on diffusion weighted imaging data to construct the edges of the structural connectomes using number of streamlines as edge weight. In addition, the whole-brain network was divided into a rich club network, a local network and a feeder network connecting the latter two. Functional outcome was measured with a parent questionnaire for executive functioning. Our results revealed a significantly decreased rich club organization (p values < .05) and impaired executive functioning (p < .001) in young patients with TBI compared with controls. Specifically, we observed reduced density values in all three subnetworks (p values < .005) and a reduced mean strength in the rich club network (p = .013) together with an increased mean strength in the local network (p = .002) in patients with TBI. This study provides new insights into the nature of TBI-induced brain network alterations and supports the hypothesis that the local subnetwork tries to compensate for the biologically costly subnetwork of rich club nodes after TBI.<br><br>© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1065-9471
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24041
ID  - ref1
ER  -