Whole-Brain Functional Connectivity Identification of Functional Dyspepsia

Abstract

Recent neuroimaging studies have shown local brain aberrations in functional dyspepsia (FD) patients, yet little attention has been paid to the whole-brain resting-state functional network abnormalities. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether FD disrupts the patterns of whole-brain networks and the abnormal functional connectivity could reflect the severity of the disease. The dysfunctional interactions between brain regions at rest were investigated in FD patients as compared with 40 age- and gender- matched healthy controls. Multivariate pattern analysis was used to evaluate the discriminative power of our results for classifying patients from controls. In our findings, the abnormal brain functional connections were mainly situated within or across the limbic/paralimbic system, the prefrontal cortex, the tempo-parietal areas and the visual cortex. About 96% of the subjects among the original dataset were correctly classified by a leave one-out cross-validation approach, and 88% accuracy was also validated in a replication dataset. The classification features were significantly associated with the patients’ dyspepsia symptoms, the self-rating depression scale and self-rating anxiety scale, but it was not correlated with duration of FD patients (p>0.05). Our results may indicate the effectiveness of the altered brain functional connections reflecting the disease pathophysiology underling FD. These dysfunctional connections may be the epiphenomena or causative agents of FD, which may be affected by clinical severity and its related emotional dimension of the disease rather than the clinical course.

Imaging brain mechanisms in chronic visceral pain

“…Correlations between some of these brain regions and clinical parameters were identified. Nan et al [55] also studied functional connectivity differences between FD and HCs, and used multivariate pattern analysis to classify patients from HCs. FD related differences in functional connectivity were mainly observed in regions of the limbic/paralimbic system (including amygdala, THAL, INS, ACC, MCC, putamen, and parahippocampus), prefrontal and temporoparietal areas.…”

Topological Alterations of the Intrinsic Brain Network in Patients with Functional Dyspepsia

“…[6][7][8][9][10] Moreover, alterations in brain links have been identified in FD patients, such as ACG-insula connectivity, insula-frontal connectivity, ACG-frontal connectivity, thalamus-sensorimotor connectivity and so on. 9,11 The above studies provided regional disturbances and changes in links between region pairs in FD patients, improving the understanding of the pathological disorders of FD. However, they ignored the complexity of the regional interactions as an entire network.…”

“…13 Many brain diseases (schizophrenia, 14 post-traumatic stress disorder, 15 major depressive disorder, 16 and epilepsy 17,18 ) are linked to the disturbed topological organization in the brain network. Imaging studies have documented that FD is a disease associated with whole-brain disorders, 11 thus we hypothesized that there were alterations in the brain network topology of FD patients. Moreover, the changes may be closely related to the increase in dyspepsia symptoms.…”

Multivariate morphological brain signatures predict patients with chronic abdominal pain from healthy control subjects

“…MVPA has been applied to describe and predict acute pain state and perception based on functional brain data [57]. In addition, MVPA based on functional and structural neuroimaging data has been applied to discriminate healthy controls (HCs) from persons with chronic pain including chronic low back pain [62], functional dyspepsia [47; 55], and interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome[4]. These analyses have provided important information regarding the possible brain mechanisms underlying chronic pain states.…”