Opposite changes in morphometric similarity of medial reward and lateral non-reward orbitofrontal cortex circuits in obesity
Debo Dong,
Ximei Chen,
Wei Li,
Xiao Gao,
Yulin Wang,
Feng Zhou,
Simon B. Eickhoff,
Hong Chen
Affiliations
Debo Dong
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Brain & Behaviour (INM-7), Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany
Ximei Chen
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Wei Li
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Xiao Gao
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Yulin Wang
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China; Sleep and NeuroImaging Center, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Feng Zhou
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Simon B. Eickhoff
Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Brain & Behaviour (INM-7), Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany; Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
Hong Chen
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China; Research Center of Psychology and Social Development, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China; Corresponding author at: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China.
Obesity has a profound impact on metabolic health thereby adversely affecting brain structure and function. However, the majority of previous studies used a single structural index to investigate the link between brain structure and body mass index (BMI), which hinders our understanding of structural covariance between regions in obesity. This study aimed to examine the relationship between macroscale cortical organization and BMI using novel morphometric similarity networks (MSNs). The individual MSNs were first constructed from individual eight multimodal cortical morphometric features between brain regions. Then the relationship between BMI and MSNs within the discovery sample of 434 participants was assessed. The key findings were further validated in an independent sample of 192 participants. We observed that the lateral non-reward orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) exhibited decoupling (i.e., reduction in integration) in obesity, which was mainly manifested by its decoupling with the cognitive systems (i.e., DMN and FPN) while the medial reward orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) showed de-differentiation (i.e., decrease in distinctiveness) in obesity, which was mainly represented by its de-differentiation with the cognitive and attention systems (i.e., DMN and VAN). Additionally, the lOFC showed de-differentiation with the visual system in obesity, while the mOFC showed decoupling with the visual system and hyper-coupling with the sensory-motor system in obesity. As an important first step in revealing the role of underlying structural covariance in body mass variability, the present study presents a novel mechanism that underlies the reward-control interaction imbalance in obesity, thus can inform future weight-management approaches.
