Self-Referential Processing and Resting-State Functional MRI Connectivity of Cortical Midline Structures in Glioma Patients

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer’s comments

Manuscript number: brainsci-1965073

Title: Self-referential processing and resting-state functional MRI connectivity of cortical midline structures in glioma patients

Summary

The authors investigated that self-referential processing (SRP) and functional connectivity (FC) of cortical midline structures (CMS) using resting-state fMRI would be altered in glioma patients compared to matched healthy controls. CMS include the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (PACC), the ventro- and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC, DMPFC), the supragenual anterior cingulate cortex (SACC), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), as well as the medial parietal (MPC) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC). They concluded that preserving the DMPFC in intervention might be relevant for maintaining self-related verbal information processing in the memory domain in patients. While this case report is educational, there are some problems.

Specific comments:

Introduction

Line 74, It would be better to change “self-referential processing” to “SRP”.

Materials and methods

Line 93. The authors summarized the clinical characteristics of the included patients. How about extent of the peritumoral edema?

I wonder why the authors included patients with different grades of brain tumors in this study.

Also, it would be better to describe how the tumor volume was calculated.

Conclusion

Line 577. Please, change “a” to “as”.

Table

Please, write the abbreviation, such as M, SD, POS and/or NEG, in full term

Overall impression

I feel that this manuscript contains valuable information worthy of publication in Brain Sciences, after minor revision has been made. I would recommend resubmission of the manuscript including considerable revisions.

Thank you very much.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, the article is very interesting, however I urge you to confirm the data with a study with a greater number of cases and controls and possibly multicentre.

in my opinion the article is interesting despite some bias. The sample is weak. An important bias is that the preoperative valutation of cognitive disease and of depression scores is surely related to the mass effect of lesion and of associated edema. The underlined symptoms may be due to the compression in the interested areas and this explains the improvement of the postoperative. I suggest to the authors to confirm the obtained results with a multicentric study.

Author Response

Please see the attachement.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx