Brain Network Connectivity of Patients With Metabolic Diseases

The global prevalence of metabolic diseases, including hypertension, type 2 T2DM mellitus (T2DM), gout and obesity, has risen over the past two decades. Brain controls human behavior and metabolism in organisms. It will be very interesting to explore whether there are similarities or relations among different metabolic diseases and how brain might be involved in the progression of different metabolic diseases.

We analyzed the PET-CT images and clinical biological markers of 112 cases of hypertension, 56 cases of T2DM, 11 cases of obesity, 14 cases of gout, and 497 cases without the above diseases. Standardized uptake value ratios (SUVRs) were extracted from different brain regions according to AAL brain atlas using Spatial-Normalization-of-Brain-PET-Images. Partial correlation analysis was used to analyze the correlation of the SUVRs of different brain regions with clinical biological markers by controlling sex, age and BMI. Brain network metabolic connectivity was analyzed using Permutation_IHEP software and visualized using BrainNet Viewer.