Disrupted topological organization of hubs in Parkinson’s disease patients with freezing of gait.

Neuroimaging studies, including resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), have implicated altered resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) in PD patients with freezing of gait (PD-FOG) and showed that the disruption of connectivity between the resting state networks (RSNs) was correlated with FOG. However, the network organization in PD-FOG remains poorly understood. In this study, we use rs-fMRI data and graph theoretical approaches to explore the reorganization of functional networks in PD-FOG. The results of our study suggest that there is a substantial reorganization of regional brain hubs and disruption in the higher-order functional network topology in PD-FOG participants compared to PD-nFOG.