This study investigated 28 elderly ESRD maintenance hemodialysis patients and 28 HC. According to what we know, our study is the first to use the TBSS method to explore elderly ESRD patients WM microstructural changes and try to determine the relationship between WM abnormalities in emotional regulation and coping styles. Our results showed that FA was significantly reduced and MD, RD and AD were generally increased in almost all WM regions in elderly ESRD maintenance hemodialysis patients compared with HC, indicating that the integrity and density of WM fiber tracts and myelin integrity were damaged.
we found that elderly ESRD patients FA value in the whole brain decreased significantly which was slightly different from previous studies. Most previous studies have shown decreased FA in most brain regions in patients with ESRD (Kong et al., 2014; Schaier et al., 2021; Yin et al., 2018) rather that the whole brain FA. We speculated that this might be caused by factors of end-stage renal disease itself. The increase of MD can indicate the reduction of dendrites and the simplification of brain microstructure (Li et al., 2016), MD widespread increase indicates that the water molecules movement in the brain tissues of patients is less restricted. This indicated that diffuse interstitial cerebral edema may exist which is supported by some previous studies (Chen et al., 2007; Kong et al., 2014). Alexander et al. (2007) pointed out that AD and RD can provide more detailed indicators of water diffusion direction than MD (Alexander et al., 2007), so we included AD and RD in our assessment of WM abnormalities in elderly ESRD hemodialysis patients. The increase of AD was associated with axon injury or nerve filament injury, suggesting gliosis. The increase in RD is related with obstructing myelination or demyelination. The limitation on the diffusion of water molecules along the short axis is reduced when myelin is damaged. Our study results showed that AD and RD were generally increased indicated that axon damage and myelin formation were obstructed in elderly ESRD hemodialysis patients. These results confirm our hypothesis that the WM damage is different in elderly ESRD hemodialysis patient and theirs’ WM injury more widespread.
The elderly are more accustomed to adopt cognitive reappraisal with relatively little expression suppression strategy due to they pay more attention to the emotional well-being (Winecoff et al., 2011). The elderly ESRD patients were significantly different from HC in cognitive reappraisal in this study. There was no obvious difference in expression suppression which may be related to the cultural specificity of expression suppression (Schimmack et al., 2002). Eastern cultural background encourages suppress negative emotion expression (Butler et al., 2007; Soto et al., 2011). We found significant differences in positive and negative coping style scores between the two groups by compared with elderly ESRD hemodialysis patients with HC. This may be due to the prevalence of negative emotions such as anxiety and depression in ESRD patients during prolonged dialysis (Al-shammari et Al., 2020; Brito et al., 2019) resulted in coping styles differences between the two groups. In addition, the use of emotional regulation strategies will affect the style they cope with problem situations.
We analyzed the correlation between four DTI parameters and the two emotional regulation strategies and the two coping styles in elderly ESRD hemodialysis patients respectively after extracted the mean FA, MD, RD and AD in the significant different brain regions. The results showed that the significant brain regions mean FA, MD, RD and AD were positively correlated with cognitive reappraisal and positive coping style (significant threshold was 0.01, FWE corrected). There was no significantly different between the four DTI parameters of WM with expression suppression and negative coping style by correction analysis after FWE correction. This suggests that the changes in WM microstructure not only affect the physiological aspects of elderly ESRD patients but also influence some coping style (such as positive coping) and emotional regulation strategies (such as cognitive reappraisal).
Finally, the mediating analysis showed that the mean FA, MD, AD and RD of the significant difference brain regions had no mediating effect on the emotional regulation strategies of cognitive reappraisal in elderly ESRD patients and HC. This is inconsistent with our hypothesis. Though we believe that WM matter damage is strongly associated with emotional and cognitive impairment but it may be that emotion regulation strategies involves a more complex aspect as it requires monitoring of the internal and external processes of emotion. FA, AD and RD of the discrepant brain regions did not mediate the positive coping style between elderly ESRD patients and HC but MD played a full mediating role between them. To some extent, this indicates that sufficient attention should be paid to the hydrocephalus in elderly ESRD patients in clinical diagnosis because the changes in WM are involved in the active coping style of individuals.
Our current study has several limitations. Firstly, the sample size is small and a larger sample should be recruited in future studies. Second, our patients are only elderly ESRD maintenance hemodialysis patients excluded peritoneal dialysis and non-dialysis elderly ESRD patients, so the results are difficult to be generalized to other elderly ESRD population. In addition, individuals' choice of coping styles and emotion regulation strategies is diverse and our questionnaires involves few coping styles and emotion regulation strategies. Further detailed measurements should be made to comprehensively assess coping styles and emotional regulation strategies in elderly ESRD patients.