Date of Award
Spring 5-9-2017
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Dr. Jessica Ann Turner
Abstract
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative genetic disease that causes motor difficulties, mood impairment, and cognitive dysfunction. Prodromal Huntington’s disease (PrHD) refers to people who carry the mutated huntingtin (htt) gene, but do not yet fit the criteria needed for a full diagnosis. Changes in mood typically begin in the prodromal phase, and apathy is a particularly devastating change that progresses in severity throughout the course of the disease. We investigated neural connectivity changes that could be associated with apathy severity within this population. We performed a seed-based connectivity analysis on resting state scans of 89 (PrHD) patients, with the supplementary motor area, bilateral caudate and caudate head as our regions of interest. We found that apathy severity was significantly correlated with increased connectivity between the caudate head and the supplementary motor area (p = 0.03). Further analyses are needed to establish the extent of the effect of caudate atrophy on this relationship, which we would predict would be highly related due to the degenerative nature of the disease.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/10131860
Recommended Citation
Fall, Elizabeth A., "Resting State Functional Connectivity of the Supplementary Motor Area and the Caudate Nucleus in Prodromal Huntington's Disease." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2017.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/10131860