Expanding the role of education in frontotemporal dementia: a functional dynamic connectivity (the chronnectome) study.

Abstract In the present study, we aim at investigating whether education modulates dynamical properties of time-varying whole-brain network connectivity (the chronnectome) in Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) at a given level of symptom severity. Dynamic connectivity parameters were evaluated in 128 FTD patients using independent component analysis, sliding-time window correlation and k-means approach to resting state-MRI data. We evaluated the relationship between education, a proxy measure of cognitive reserve (CR), and four indexes of meta-state dynamic connectivity: i) the number of distinct meta-states a subject passes through, ii) the number of switches from one meta-state to another, iii) the span of the realized meta-states, and iv) the total distance travelled in the state space. We found a significant inverse correlation between years of education and the four indexes of meta-state dynamic fluidity (all p-values This study suggests that FTD patients with higher education but comparable clinical severity show more global functional brain impairment, suggesting that subjects with higher CR can cope with more global brain fluidity reduction.