• Jui-Yang Hong, Lisa A Kilpatrick, Jennifer Labus, Arpana Gupta, Zhiguo Jiang, Cody Ashe-McNalley, Jean Stains, Nuwanthi Heendeniya, Bahar Ebrat, Suzanne Smith, Kirsten Tillisch, Bruce Naliboff, and Emeran A Mayer.
• Gail and Gerald Oppenheimer Family Center for Neurobiology of Stress, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.
• J. Neurosci. 2013 Jul 17;33(29):11994-2002.

AbstractAbnormal responses of the brain to delivered and expected aversive gut stimuli have been implicated in the pathophysiology of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a visceral pain syndrome occurring more commonly in women. Task-free resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can provide information about the dynamics of brain activity that may be involved in altered processing and/or modulation of visceral afferent signals. Fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation is a measure of the power spectrum intensity of spontaneous brain oscillations. This approach was used here to identify differences in the resting-state activity of the human brain in IBS subjects compared with healthy controls (HCs) and to identify the role of sex-related differences. We found that both the female HCs and female IBS subjects had a frequency power distribution skewed toward high frequency to a greater extent in the amygdala and hippocampus compared with male subjects. In addition, female IBS subjects had a frequency power distribution skewed toward high frequency in the insula and toward low frequency in the sensorimotor cortex to a greater extent than male IBS subjects. Correlations were observed between resting-state blood oxygen level-dependent signal dynamics and some clinical symptom measures (e.g., abdominal discomfort). These findings provide the first insight into sex-related differences in IBS subjects compared with HCs using resting-state fMRI.

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