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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Brain Imaging Methods
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1555553
Disruption of structural connectome hierarchy in age-related hearing loss
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Mathematical Sciences, Beihang University, Beijing, China
- 2 Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, Beijing, China
- 3 Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China
Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is a common sensory disability among older adults and is considered a risk factor for the development of dementia. Previous work has shown altered brain connectome topology in ARHL, including abnormal nodal strength and clustering coefficient. However, whether ARHL affects the hierarchical organization of structural connectome and how these alterations relate to transcriptomic signatures remain unknown. Here, we apply a gradient mapping framework to the structural connectome derived from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. We focus on the first three structural gradients that reflect distinct hierarchical organization of structural connectome, and assess ARHL-related changes. We find that, compared to controls, ARHL patients exhibit widespread disruptions of structural connectome organization, spanning from primary sensory areas (e.g., somatomotor network) to high-order association areas (e.g., default mode network). Subsequently, by employing subcortical-weighted gradients derived from weighting cortical gradients by subcortical-cortical connectivity, we observe that ARHL patients show significantly altered subcortical-cortical connectivity in the left caudate, left nucleus accumbens, right hippocampus, and right amygdala. Finally, we investigate the 1 Zhen et al.relationship between gene expression and alterations in structural gradients. We observed that these alterations in structural gradients are associated with weighted gene expression profiles, with relevant genes preferentially enriched for inorganic ion transmembrane transport and terms related to regulating biological processes. Taken together, these findings highlight that ARHL is associated with abnormal structural connectome hierarchy and reveal the transcriptomic relevance of these abnormalities, contributing to a richer understanding of the neurobiological substrates in ARHL.
Keywords: Hierarchical organization, Structural gradient, age-related hearing loss, transcriptional signatures, brain network, Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Received: 04 Jan 2025; Accepted: 24 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhen, Zheng, Zheng, Zheng, Yang and Tang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yaqian Yang, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, 100083, China
Shaoting Tang, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, 100083, China
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