Abstract

Dopaminergic medication is widely used to alleviate motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but these medications also impact cognition with significant variability across patients. It is hypothesized that dopaminergic medication impacts cognition and working memory in PD by modulating frontoparietal-basal ganglia cognitive control circuits, but little is known about the underlying causal signalling mechanisms and their relation to individual differences in response to dopaminergic medication. Here we use a novel state-space computational model with ultra-fast (490 msec resolution) fMRI to investigate dynamic causal signalling in frontoparietal-basal ganglia circuits associated with working memory in 44 PD patients ON and OFF dopaminergic medication, as well as matched 36 healthy controls. Our analysis revealed aberrant causal signaling in frontoparietal-basal ganglia circuits in PD patients OFF medication. Importantly, aberrant signaling was normalized by dopaminergic medication and a novel quantitative distance measure predicted individual differences in cognitive change associated with medication in PD patients. These findings were specific to causal signaling measures, as no such effects were detected with conventional non-causal connectivity measures. Our analysis also identified a specific frontoparietal causal signaling pathway from right middle frontal gyrus to right posterior parietal cortex that is impaired in PD. Unlike in healthy controls, the strength of causal interactions in this pathway did not increase with working memory load and the strength of load-dependent causal weights was not related to individual differences in working memory task performance in PD patients OFF medication. However, dopaminergic medication in PD patients reinstated the relation with working memory performance. Our findings provide new insights into aberrant causal brain circuit dynamics during working memory and identify mechanisms by which dopaminergic medication normalizes cognitive control circuits.

View details for DOI 10.1093/brain/awac007

View details for PubMedID 35357463