Mapping the distribution of neurotransmitters to resting-state functional connectivity in patients with Parkinson’s disease

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Abstract Dopamine and serotonin are major monoamine neurotransmitters associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD), but the spatial distribution of these neurotransmitters and their relationship to underlying functional brain architecture are not fully understood. Here, estimates of functional connectivity were derived using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), while 11C-PE2I and 11C-DASB PET were used to evaluate interregional homogeneity of dopamine and serotonin levels, referred to as PET covariance, in 30 PD patients at baseline. Of these, 15 PD patients were followed up for 19 months. A region-of-interest (ROI)-based approach was adopted using 138 ROIs from the Automated Anatomical Labelling 3 (AAL3) atlas, excluding cerebellar regions, which were further grouped into canonical networks: visual, sensorimotor, attention, limbic, frontoparietal, default mode, subcortical, and brainstem. At baseline, linear regression revealed that FC was positively related to both 11C-PE2I covariance (β-values ranging from 0.478 to 0.800, p

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