The role of the DLPFC in inductive reasoning of MCI patients and normal agings: An fMRI study

Previous studies of young people have revealed that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays an important role in inductive reasoning. An fMRI experiment was performed in this study to examine whether the left DLPFC was involved in inductive reasoning of MCI patients and normal agings, and whether the activation pattern of this region was different between MCI patients and normal agings. The fMRI results indicated that MCI patients had no difference from normal agings in behavior per-formance (reaction time and accuracy) and the activation pattern of DLPFC. However, the BOLD re-sponse of the DLPFC region for MCI patients was weaker than that for normal agings, and the func-tional connectivity between the bilateral DLPFC regions for MCI patients was significantly higher than for normal agings. Taken together, these results indicated that DLPFC plays an important role in inductive reasoning of agings, and the functional abnormity of DLPFC may be an earlier marker of MCI before structural alterations.