Objective: To explore the changes of resting state functional connectivity of dentate nucleus in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and to analyze its correlation with cognitive function. Methods: A total of 34 patients with aMCI were selected as the observation group, and another 34 healthy elderly people were selected as the control group. Data were acquired by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to compare the differences in functional connectivity between the bilateral dentate nuclei and other regions of the whole brain in the two groups; and partial correlation was used to analyze the correlation between functional connectivity and clinical scale scores and biomarker in patients with aMCI. Results: Compared with the control group, the connections between the left dentate nucleus and the left temporal lobe and the right thalamus, the right dentate nucleus and the left superior temporal gyrus and the right posterior cerebellar lobe were enhanced in the observation group (alphasim correction, P<0.05, voxel number> 100). Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE) and verbal fluency test(VFT) were positively correlated with the functional connectivity between left dentate nucleus and right thalamus (r=0.399, P=0.026; r=0.383, P=0.025), while the functional connectivity between right dentate nucleus and left superior temporal gyrus was negatively correlated with auditory verbal learning for recognition (r=-0.552, P=0.001) and positively correlated with phosphorylated tau protein (r=0.357, P=0.045). Conclusion: The specific cerebellar-cortical functional connection was enhanced in the aMCI stage, and this enhancement is related to the cognitive function scale and biomarker.

［Key words］amnestic mild cognitive impairment; resting-state functional magnetic resonance; dentate nucleus; cerebellum; cognition