Aberrant functionalconnectivity withinthe basal ganglia of patients with Parkinson3 sd isease

article Resting state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) has been previously shown to be a promising tool for the assessment of early Parkinson3s disease (PD). In order to assess whether changes within the basal ganglia network (BGN) are disease specific or relate to neurodegeneration generally, BGN connectivity was assessed in 32 patients with early PD, 19 healthy controls and 31 patients with Alzheimer3s disease (AD). Voxel-wise comparisons demon- strated decreased connectivity within the basal ganglia of patients with PD, when compared to patients with