Atrophy of hypothalamic subunits in Alzheimer’s disease

Background Non‐cognitive deficits (e.g., sleep‐cycle and neuroendocrine alterations) are commonly observed in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and are suggestive of hypothalamic (HPT) dysfunctions (Ishii and Iadecola., 2015). However, studies on the HPT involvement in the early stages of the disease are limited. Here, we compared the volumes of HPT and its subunits in cognitively unimpaired (CU), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD. Method Twenty‐nine cognitively unimpaired (CU), 21 MCI, and 21 AD participants were enrolled and underwent 3T MRI and neuropsychological exams. 3D T1‐weighted images were processed using the standard FreeSurfer v7.2 pipeline, and the newly released tool for the automated segmentation of HPT and its subunits (Billot et al., 2020). After normalization to the total intracranial volume, whole and subunits HTP volumes were compared among groups using the Kruskall‐Wallis test with Dunn‐Bonferroni correction. Result MCI and AD showed lower left (p