Objective: To explore regional homogeneity (ReHo) alterations after acupuncture treatment in poststroke cognitive impairment (PSCI) patients. Methods: Twenty-one PSCI patients who underwent acupuncture therapy in our hospital and 12 matched healthy controls were enrolled in this study. All study subjects underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI); for PSCI patients, rs-fMRI scans were conducted before and after acupuncture therapy. Data preprocessing was performed using the DPARSF5.4 and SPM12 toolkits on the MATLAB 2022b platform. DPARSF5.4 was used to calculate the ReHo index of the preprocessed resting-state data. A two-sample t-test was used to compare the differences in ReHo between the PSCI patients group pretreatment and the control group (with sex and age as covariates), and a paired t-test was used to compare the differences in ReHo between the pretreatment and posttreatment groups of PSCI patients (without covariates). AAL_116_binary_ mask.nii was used as the statistical mask, and the statistical results were corrected using family-wise error correction, with P < 0.001 at the voxel level and P < 0.05 at the cluster level considered to indicate statistical significance. Results: In the right cerebellum area 6, the ReHo of the pretreatment PSCI group was significantly greater than that of the control group; in the left middle frontal gyrus, the ReHo of the posttreatment PSCI group was significantly higher than that of the pretreatment group. Conclusion: PSCI patients exhibited abnormal ReHo in the resting state, and ReHo was significantly altered after acupuncture treatment. The results of this study suggest that ReHo might be a potential biomarker in the diagnosis and treatment of PSCI.
Loading....