New insights into the brain involvement in patients with Crohn’s disease: a voxel‐based morphometry study

Abstract

Crohn's disease is associated with brain morphological changes in cortical and subcortical structures involved in nociception, emotional, and cognitive processes. Our findings provide new insight into the brain involvement in chronic inflammatory bowel disorders.

Differences in regional homogeneity between patients with Crohn's disease with and without abdominal pain revealed by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging

“…Our previous study also revealed that the GM volumes in these brain regions of CD patients were significantly lower comparing to that of HCs [8]. Agostini et al [1] reported GM volume decreases in the anterior MCC and part of the dorsolateral PFC of CD patients. Zikou et al found decreased GM volumes in the right SMA, in the bilateral inferior temporal gyrus and some other brain regions in IBD patients [47].…”

“…Many recent studies of pain-related diseases, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) [19, 28], migraine [44], and complex regional pain syndrome [10], have adopted rs-fMRI to detect pathophysiological changes in certain brain regions that are related to the recognition and processing of pain signals. In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of MRI to detect the correlation between brain activities and inflammatory visceral pain in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) [1-3, 6, 20, 47]. Previous studies show alternations in gray matter (GM) structures including GM volumes and cortical thickness in multiple brain regions of CD patients, which in certain brain regions are correlated with disease duration [1, 6].…”

“…In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of MRI to detect the correlation between brain activities and inflammatory visceral pain in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) [1-3, 6, 20, 47]. Previous studies show alternations in gray matter (GM) structures including GM volumes and cortical thickness in multiple brain regions of CD patients, which in certain brain regions are correlated with disease duration [1, 6]. CD patients also have been found to exhibit altered habituation to stress and altered neural activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, insula, putamen, and cerebellar regions when performing stress-evoking tasks [2].…”

Irritable bowel syndrome in female patients is associated with alterations in structural brain networks

“…Structural alterations of the brain in the form of higher or lower gray matter (GM) density and volume and cortical thickness (CT) have been reported in a wide range of chronic somatic and visceral pain conditions, including chronic inflammatory conditions (osteoarthritis [6; 107], chronic pancreatitis [49; 128], Crohn’s disease [2]), persistent often comorbid pain syndromes (temporomandibular disorder [51; 54; 95; 115; 144], vulvodynia [115], chronic pelvic pain [5; 97], irritable bowel syndrome [12; 35; 116], fibromyalgia [20; 75; 143]), migraine [71; 106; 111; 141], chronic tension-type headache [113], cyclical menstrual pain [138]) and other pain conditions (chronic lower back pain [4; 99; 112; 139], complex regional pain syndrome [50; 53; 54; 99],) The variability in reported findings may be in part related to the fact that the majority of these studies were relatively small, and poorly controlled for medication intake, the presence of comorbid conditions, or sex. The most commonly reported regions with lower GM were subregions of cingulate and insular cortices, temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex and thalamus/basal ganglia [34; 88], while disease related regional GM volume increases have been reported in a few studies [94; 115; 116], involving basal ganglia, hippocampus, anterior cingulate (ACC) subregions, posterior insula, and somatosensory cortex (S1).…”

Psychiatric comorbidity in the treatment of patients with inflammatory bowel disease

“…These therapies include psychotherapy, guided imagery and relaxation training, analgesic dosages of morphine or antidepressants, and hypnosis. Thus, a new generation of novel treatments may emerge from drug and nontraditional therapies for CD in this formative area of research [3,4] . Nevertheless, a certain level of caution should remain: the same areas have been found to be susceptible to changes in temporal epilepsy [5] , and it remains unclear whether the volume alterations in these areas are specific to IBD or if they overlap with other diseases.…”