Structural connectome alterations in anxious dogs: a DTI-based study

Qinyuan Chen, Yangfeng Xu, Emma Christiaen, Guo-Rong Wu, Sara De Witte, Christian Vanhove, Jimmy Saunders, Kathelijne Peremans, Chris Baeken

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Samenvatting

Anxiety and fear are dysfunctional behaviors commonly observed in domesticated dogs. Although dogs and humans share psychopathological similarities, little is known about how dysfunctional fear behaviors are represented in brain networks in dogs diagnosed with anxiety disorders. A combination of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and graph theory was used to investigate the underlying structural connections of dysfunctional anxiety in anxious dogs and compared with healthy dogs with normal behavior. The degree of anxiety was assessed using the Canine Behavioral Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ), a widely used, validated questionnaire for abnormal behaviors in dogs. Anxious dogs showed significantly decreased clustering coefficient (C p), decreased global efficiency (E glob), and increased small-worldness (σ) when compared with healthy dogs. The nodal parameters that differed between the anxious dogs and healthy dogs were mainly located in the posterior part of the brain, including the occipital lobe, posterior cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, mesencephalon, and cerebellum. Furthermore, the nodal degree (K i) of the left cerebellum was significantly negatively correlated with “excitability” in the C-BARQ of anxious dogs. These findings could contribute to the understanding of a disrupted brain structural connectome underlying the pathological mechanisms of anxiety-related disorders in dogs.

Originele taal-2English
Artikelnummer9946
Aantal pagina's11
TijdschriftScientific reports
Volume13
Nummer van het tijdschrift1
DOI's
StatusPublished - dec 2023

Bibliografische nota

Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the following funding. QC is supported by fellowship funding from the China Scholarship Council. YX is supported by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) project G011018N. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61876156 and No. 62271415). This work was also supported by the Queen Elisabeth Medical Foundation for Neurosciences; by the Ghent University Multidisciplinary Research Partnership “The integrative neuroscience of behavioral control”; by an Applied Biomedical (TBM) grant of the Agency for Innovation through Science and Technology (IWT); part of the FWO PrevenD Project 2.0 (T000720N).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).

Copyright:
Copyright 2023 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

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