I Ieng Chao1, Vincent Chin-Hung Chen2, Hse-Huang Chao3, Ming-Chou Ho4, and Jun-Cheng Weng1,5
1Department of Medical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan, 2Department of Psychiatry, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Chiayi, Taiwan, 3Tiawan Center for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, Jen-Ai Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan, 4Department of Psychology, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan, 5Department of Medical Imaging, Chung Shan Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan
Obesity is
one of the most serious public health concerns among adults and children in the
21st century, which increases risk of many other diseases, including
cardiovascular risks, hypertension, dyslipidemia, endothelial dysfunction,
etc., and it is commonly measured with body mass index (BMI). Previously
studies about obesity mainly used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine the
relationship between BMI and DTI parameters, and found that white matter
integrity was reduced in obesity. However, the research about the
particular structural brain network change of obese patients was tended to be
less. Hence, our study aimed to map the structural connectomic changes over obese
patients based on DTI tractography using graph theoretical and network-based statistic
(NBS) analyses.
In the result of graph theoretical analysis, poor ability
of local segregation, global integration, and transitivity in the obese
patients was found. In the result of NBS, decreased connections in structural
connectivity network, and alterations in the corpus callosum region was observed.
