Brain Resting-State Network Alterations Associated With Crohn's Disease

Abstract

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic disease that is associated with aspects of brain anatomy and activity. In this preliminary MRI study, we investigated differences in brain structure and in functional connectivity (FC) of brain regions in 35 participants with Crohn's disease (CD) and 21 healthy controls (HC). Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis was performed to contrast CD and HC structural images. Region of interest (ROI) analyses were run to assess FC for resting-state network nodes. Independent component analysis (ICA) identified whole brain differences in FC associated with resting-state networks. Though no structural differences were found, ROI analyses showed increased FC between the frontoparietal (FP) network and salience network (SN), and decreased FC between nodes of the default mode network (DMN). ICA results revealed changes involving cerebellar (CER), visual (VIS), and SN components. Differences in FC associated with sex were observed for both ROI analysis and ICA. Taken together, these changes are consistent with an influence of CD on the brain and serve to direct future research hypotheses.

Healthy Aging Alters the Functional Connectivity of Creative Cognition in the Default Mode Network and Cerebellar Network

“…The threshold of 2 is well-defined and used to characterize connections within each component in several previous resting-state fMRI studies. Eleven resting-state brain networks were obtained using this ICA approach, including the DMN, ECN, CN, VN, SN, language network (LN), fronto-parietal network (FPN), auditory network (AN), and SMR using the correlation based spatial match-to-template in CONN (Kornelsen et al, 2020 ). The major brain networks identified in both younger and older participants by the group-ICA are presented in Figure 2 .…”

Altered brain structural connectivity in patients with longstanding gut inflammation is correlated with psychological symptoms and disease duration

“…Gray matter was parceled into 165 regions based on the Destrieux ( Destrieux et al, 2010 ) and Harvard-Oxford Subcortical atlases ( Desikan et al, 2006 ), all of which served as network nodes. We investigated specific regions of interest (ROIs) based on prior neuroimaging research on IBS ( Bhatt et al, 2019a , Ellingson et al, 2013a , Ellingson et al, 2013b , Mayer et al, 2015 ), IBD ( Kornelsen et al, 2020 ), and chronic pain participants ( Bhatt et al, 2019b , Gupta et al, 2019 , Woodworth et al, 2015 ). The ROIs and their associated functional networks included: somatosensory network (precentral gyrus and sulcus [M1], supplementary motor area [SMA/M2], postcentral gyrus and sulcus [S1], thalamus, posterior insula [pINS]); basal-ganglia network (nucleus accumbens [NAcc], putamen [Pu], globus pallidus [Pal] and caudate nucleus [CaN]); salience network (anterior insula [aINS], anterior midcingulate cortex [aMCC], orbitofrontal cortex [OFC]), and default mode network (precuneus [PrCun], posterior dorsal part of the cingulate gyrus [PosDCgG], angular gyrus [AngG], transverse frontopolar gyri and sulci [TrFPoG_S], middle temporal gyrus [MTG], lateral aspect of the superior temporal gyrus [SupTGLp]).…”

Exploring joint patterns of brain structure and function in inflammatory bowel diseases using multimodal data fusion

“…Patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) like Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) suffer from an unpredictable disease course and relapsing symptoms of intestinal inflammation such as abdominal pain and diarrhea, but also extraintestinal manifestations (EIM), fatigue, and a high prevalence of coexistent mood disorders. Changes in brain structure and function have repeatedly been described in IBD [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] with heterogeneous results.…”

“…11 Studies investigating intrinsic neural function in patients with IBD using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) revealed activity changes in several brain areas, particularly in anterior cortical midline regions. [15][16][17] A recent meta-analysis on structural and functional brain changes in CD highlighted lower intrinsic neural activity in cingulate cortex and paracentral lobule, as well as lower gray matter volume (GMV) in the medial frontal gyrus. 19 In contrast to CD, neuroimaging data in UC are very scarce.…”