Cerebral topography of vesicular cholinergic transporter changes in neurologically intact adults: A [18F]FEOBV PET study

Prabesh Kanel*, Sygrid van der Zee, Carlos A Sanchez-Catasus, Robert A Koeppe, Peter J H Scott, Teus van Laar, Roger L Albin, Nicolaas I Bohnen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Acetylcholine plays a major role in brain cognitive and motor functions with regional cholinergic terminal loss common in several neurodegenerative disorders. We describe age-related declines of regional cholinergic neuron terminal density in vivo using the positron emission tomography (PET) ligand [18F](-)5-Fluoroethoxybenzovesamicol ([18F] FEOBV), a vesamicol analogue selectively binding to the vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT). A total of 42 subjects without clinical evidence of neurologic disease (mean 50.55 [range 20-80] years, 24 Male/18 Female) underwent [18F]FEOBV brain PET imaging. We used SPM based voxel-wise statistical analysis to perform whole brain voxel-based parametric analysis (family-wise error corrected, FWE) and to also extract the most significant clusters of regions correlating with aging with gender as nuisance variable. Age-related VAChT binding reductions were found in primary sensorimotor cortex, visual cortex, caudate nucleus, anterior to mid-cingulum, bilateral insula, para-hippocampus, hippocampus, anterior temporal lobes/amygdala, dorsomedial thalamus, metathalamus, and cerebellum (gender and FWE-corrected, P < 0.05). These findings show a specific topographic pattern of regional vulnerability of cholinergic nerve terminals across multiple cholinergic systems accompanying aging.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100039
Number of pages8
JournalAging brain
Volume2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28-Mar-2022

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