RESEARCH ARTICLE Reduced Regional Brain Cortical Thickness in Patients with Heart Failure

Aims Autonomic, cognitive, and neuropsychologic deficits appear in heart failure (HF) subjects, and these compromised functions depend on cerebral cortex integrity in addition to that of subcortical and brainstem sites. Impaired autoregulation, low cardiac output, sleep-disor-dered-breathing, hypertension, and diabetic conditions in HF offer considerable potential to affect cortical areas by loss of neurons and glia, which would be expressed as reduced cor-tical thicknesses. However, except for gross descriptions of cortical volume loss/injury, re-gional cortical thickness integrity in HF is unknown. Our goal was to assess regional cortical thicknesses across the brain in HF, compared to control subjects. Methods and Results We examined localized cortical thicknesses in 35 HF and 61 control subjects with high-reso-lution T1-weighted images (3.0-Tesla MRI) using FreeSurfer software, and assessed group differences with analysis-of-covariance (covariates; age, gender; p<0.05; FDR). Significant-ly-reduced cortical thicknesses appeared in HF over controls in multiple areas, including th