Changes in sensorimotor network dynamics in resting-state recordings in Parkinson’s disease

Abstract Non-invasive recordings of magnetoencephalography have been used for developing biomarkers for neural changes associated with Parkinson’s disease that can be measured across the entire course of the disease. These studies, however, have yielded inconsistent findings. Here, we investigated whether analysing motor cortical activity within the context of large-scale brain network activity provides a more sensitive marker of changes in Parkinson’s disease using magnetoencephalography. We extracted motor cortical beta power and beta bursts from resting-state magnetoencephalography scans of patients with Parkinson’s disease (N = 28) and well-matched healthy controls (N = 36). To situate beta bursts in their brain network contexts, we used a time-delay-embedded hidden Markov model to extract brain network activity and investigated co-occurrence patterns between brain networks and beta bursts. Parkinson’s disease was associated with decreased beta power in motor cortical power spectra, but no significant differences in motor cortical beta-burst dynamics occurred when using a conventional beta-burst analysis. Dynamics of a large-scale sensorimotor network extracted with the time-delay-embedded hidden Markov model approach revealed significant decreases in the occurrence of this network with Parkinson’s disease. By comparing conventional burst and time-delay-embedded hidden Markov model state occurrences, we observed that motor beta bursts occurred during both sensorimotor and non-sensorimotor network activations. When using the large-scale network information provided by the time-delay-embedded hidden Markov model to focus on bursts that were active during sensorimotor network activations, significant decreases in burst dynamics could be observed in patients with Parkinson’s disease. In conclusion, our findings suggest that decreased motor cortical beta power in Parkinson’s disease is prominently associated with changes in sensorimotor network dynamics using magnetoencephalography. Thus, investigating large-scale networks or considering the large-scale network context of motor cortical activations may be crucial for identifying alterations in the sensorimotor network that are prevalent in Parkinson’s disease and might help resolve contradicting findings in the literature.