Hemispheric Patterns of Recruitment of Object Processing Regions in Early Alzheimer’s Disease: A Study Along the Entire Ventral Stream

Background: Investigation of neural response patterns along the entire network of functionally defined object recognition ventral stream regions in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is surprisingly lacking. Objective: We aimed to investigate putative functional reorganization along a wide-ranging network of known regions in the ventral visual stream in mild AD. Methods: Overall we investigated 6 regions of interest (5 of which were not investigated before), in 19 AD patients and 19 controls, in both hemispheres along the ventral visual stream: Fusiform Face Area, Fusiform Body Area, Extrastriate Body Area, Lateral Occipital Cortex, Parahippocampal Place Area, and Visual Word Form Area, while assessing object recognition performance. Results: We found group differences in dprime measures for all object categories, corroborating generalized deficits in object recognition. Concerning neural responses, we found region dependent group differences respecting a priori expected Hemispheric asymmetries. Patients showed significantly decreased BOLD responses in the right hemisphere-biased Fusiform Body Area, and lower left hemisphere responses in the Visual Word Form Area (with a priori known left hemispheric bias), consistent with deficits in body shape and word/pseudoword processing deficits. This hemispheric dominance related effects were preserved when controlling for performance differences. Whole brain analysis during the recognition task showed enhanced activity in AD group of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left cingulate gyrus, and in the posterior cingulate cortex— a hotspot of amyloid-β accumulation. Conclusion: These findings demonstrate region dependent respecting hemispheric dominance patterns activation changes in independently localized selective regions in mild AD, accompanied by putative compensatory activity of frontal and cingular networks.