Study on executive function and brain functional connection characteristics of deaf children

Objective To explore the relationship between executive dysfunction and brain functional connectivity in deaf children and its mechanisms. Methods Twenty-eight deaf children were recruited from special education schools and twenty-seven children with normal hearing were treated as controls matched with deaf children in age, sex and education. All human subjects were scheduled to complete brain magnetic resonance scanning, based on the voxel-based morphometry (VBM) technique for detecting differences in gray matter volume (GMV) and a set of executive function (EF) tasks for detecting differences in EF behavior performance between deaf and normal hearing children. All human subjects were also performed resting-state fMRI, which were analyzed by independent component analysis (ICA) and the executive control network was selected and compared between the deaf and normal hearing children. Results Compared with the children with normal hearing, deaf children had smaller volume of gray matter in the left angular gyrus (MIN coordinates: -48, -72, 45; 700 voxels), right superior parietal gyrus (MIN coordinates: 20, -62, 57; 594 voxels) and left middle occipital gyrus(MIN coordinates: -32, -87, 42; 782 voxels). Deaf children had weaker functional connectivity (FC) in the left middle frontal gyrus, orbital part/left inferior frontal gyrus (MIN coordinates: -24, 21, 3; 54 voxels) with normal hearing children. In the behavioral test, deaf children had defects in the switching function compared with normal children, which was statistically significant (t(42)=2.39, P=0.02). Conclusion The EF of deaf children has some defects, and its neural mechanism may be related with the reduced functional connectivity and gray matter volume in the brain regions related to executive function. Key words: Deafness; Executive function; Functional connectivity; fMRI