Objective: To test the hypothesis that fluctuations in integrative brain states and/or arousal drive spontaneous fluctuations in PD rest tremor.

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) rest tremor emerges from pathological activity in the basal ganglia and cerebello-thalamo-cortical circuits. A well-known clinical feature is the waxing-and-waning of PD tremor amplitude, but the mechanisms that drive this variability are unclear. Previous work has shown that arousal amplifies PD tremor by increasing between-network connectivity. Furthermore, brain states in PD are biased towards integration rather than segregation, a pattern that is also associated with increased arousal.

Method: We compared the temporal relationship between cerebral integration, the ascending arousal system, and tremor, both during cognitive load and in the resting state. In 40 tremor-dominant PD patients, we performed functional MRI with concurrent tremor recordings and proxy measures of the ascending arousal system (pupil diameter, heart rate). We calculated whole-brain dynamic functional connectivity and used graph-theory to determine a scan-by-scan measure of cerebral integration, which we related to the onset of tremor episodes.

Results: Fluctuations in cerebral integration were time-locked to spontaneous changes in tremor amplitude: cerebral integration increased 13 seconds before tremor onset and predicted the amplitude of subsequent increases in tremor amplitude. During but not before tremor episodes, pupil diameter and heart rate increased and correlated with tremor amplitude.

Conclusion: Integrative brain states are an important cerebral environment in which tremor-related activity emerges, which is then amplified by the ascending arousal system. New treatments focused on attenuating enhanced cerebral integration in PD may reduce tremor.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/integrative-brain-states-facilitate-the-expression-of-parkinsons-tremor/