Altered regional homogeneity and homotopic connectivity in Chinese breast cancer survivors with fear of cancer recurrence: A Resting-State fMRI Study

Background: Fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) has been one of the most distressing concerns for breast cancer survivors, but the neuroimaging mechanism underlying fear of cancer recurrence still remains unclear. Methods: : We recruited 62 breast cancer survivors (31 in the high FCR group and 31 in the low FCR group) to explore the inter-group differences in neuroimaging findings. The data of 3 subjects with low FCR were eliminated because they had not completed all the experiments. All the participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) scan. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) and voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) methods were applied to analyze the imaging data. Results: : Breast cancer survivors with high and low FCR showed significantly different ReHo in the left caudate nucleus and precuneus, and significantly different VMHC in the posterior cerebellar lobe, the superior frontal gyrus, the orbital part, the inferior frontal gyrus, the occipital gyrus, the inferior parietal lobule and the frontal middle gyrus. FCR was negatively correlated with the mean ReHo of left caudate nucleus ( r =-0.501, p =0.00004), and positively correlated with the mean ReHo of right precuneus lobe ( r =0.505, p =0.000038). Besides, FCR was positively correlated with the mean VMHC value of bilateral superior occipital gyrus ( r =0.438, p =0.00051). Conclusion: This study suggested that the left caudate nucleus, right precuneus lobe and bilateral superior occipital gyrus were involved in the neuropathology of FCR.