There are many active research projects accessing and applying shared ADNI data. Use the search above to find specific research focuses on the active ADNI investigations. This information is requested annually as a requirement for data access.
| Principal Investigator | |
| Principal Investigator's Name: | Tianyi zhang |
| Institution: | Zhejiang University |
| Department: | Neurology |
| Country: | |
| Proposed Analysis: | Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common neurodegenerative disease, characterized by progressive cognitive impairment. Although there is no effective medicine to prevent the onset of AD or reverse disease progression, early diagnosis, and reduction of risk factors help slow down AD progression. Smoking is one of the modifiable risk factors for dementia. Smokers are approximately 1.6 times more likely to suffer from AD than non-smokers. Acute cognitive effects of nicotine, the main ingredient of tobacco, were characterized by enhanced selective attention and memory. However, compared with never smokers, active smokers had poorer performance on global cognitive function and multiple neurocognitive domains. Therefore, we hypothesized that smoking might modulate cognitive function with different effects at different cognitive stages. The nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) is a potential target for nicotine, with the highest density in the insula. The insula plays a pivotal role in smoking craving and regulating withdrawal during abstinence. Naqvi et al. reported that the lesions to the insula disrupt the smoking addiction, which has updated our understanding of smoking-related structures in the brain. Among previous smokers, patients with damage to the insula suffered from fewer and less severe withdrawal symptoms than those without insula injury. A Voxel-Based Morphometry study showed that cigarette smoking was associated with atrophies in many regions, including the insula. One functional MRI (fMRI) study demonstrated that heavy smokers exhibited increased regional homogeneity in the posterior cingulate cortex and insula. Increased functional connectivity (FC) of the anterior insula (AI) improved smoking cessation outcomes. Structurally, the insula is divided into anterior and posterior lobules by the central insular sulcus. The AI is involved in self-awareness, emotional responses, and cognitive control. At the same time, the posterior insula (PI) is functionally connected with areas involved in sensorimotor-interoceptive functions. Insula atrophy is related to cognitive impairment in neurodegenerative diseases such as AD, Parkinson’s disease, and frontotemporal dementia. The insula, especially the anterior lobe, plays a key role in high-level cognitive control and attentional processes. Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) can reflect the correlation between different brain regions. Since the insula acts as the mutual node of both smoking and cognitive, insula FC could be the potential imaging marker to account for the different effects of smoking in different cognitive stages. We investigated the effects of smoking on insula-related brain networks in cognitively normal (CN) controls and MCI patients using seed-based FC analyses. Based on previous studies, we hypothesized that the effect of smoking on insula FC might increase in CN controls but decrease in MCI patients. Therefore, we apply for data from Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. |
| Additional Investigators |
