• Ruirui Sun, Jie Zhou, Yuzhu Qu, Jun Zhou, Guixing Xu, and Shirui Cheng.
• The Acupuncture and Tuina School/The 3rd Teaching Hospital, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2020 Nov 25; 99 (48): e23292e23292.

BackgroundFunctional dyspepsia (FD) is one of the most common functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) and significantly influences patients' quality of life. Many studies have found that patients with FD show significant functional abnormalities in multiple brain regions. However, these functional cerebral abnormalities are not fully consistent. This protocol aims to qualitatively and quantitatively assess and synthesize the functional cerebral abnormalities found in FD.MethodsA systematic search will be conducted in 4 electronic databases (Medline, Web of Science, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library) from inception to June 30, 2019, with the language restricted to English. Study selection will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Quality assessment will be performed with a custom 11-point checklist. The functional changes in brain regions and the correlations between these altered brain regions and clinical variables in patients with FD will be evaluated through qualitative review. If data are available, an Anisotropic Effect Size version of Signed Differential Mapping (AES-SDM) will be used to synthesize the brain functional alterations and clinical variables in patients with FD.ResultsThis review and meta-analysis will qualitatively and quantitatively assess and synthesize functional cerebral abnormalities consistently found in FD.ConclusionThis may assist in mapping functional brain abnormalities to characterize imaging-based neural markers of FD and improve our knowledge of the pathogenesis of FD.Prospero Registration NumberCRD42019134983 (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/).

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