Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2023 Oct 1;44(14):4956-4966. doi: 10.1002/hbm.26436. Epub 2023 Aug 1.
Recent studies have reported that various brain regions, mainly sensory, unimodal regions, display phase synchronization with the stomach's slow (0.05 Hz) myoelectrical rhythm. These gastric-brain interactions have broad implications, from feeding behavior to functional gastrointestinal disorders. However, in contrast to other interoceptive signals (e.g., heart rate) and their relation to the brain, little is known about the reliability of these gastric-brain interactions, their robustness to artifacts such as motion, and whether they can be generalized to new samples. Here we examined these aspects in 43 subjects that had undergone multiple runs of concurrent electrogastrography (EGG), brain fMRI, and pulse oximetry. We also repeated all analyses in an open dataset of a highly sampled individual. We found a set of brain regions that were coupled with the EGG signal after controlling for non-grey matter (GM) signals, head motion, and cardiac artifacts. These regions exhibited significant overlap with previous work. However, we also showed that prior to confound regression, the spatial extent of the gastric network was largely overestimated. Finally, we found substantial test-retest reliability in both the brain and the gastric signals when estimated alone, but not for measures of gastric-brain synchrony. Together, these results provide methodological scaffolding for future research into brain-stomach interactions and for a better understanding of the role of the gastric network.
最近的研究报告称，各种大脑区域，主要是感觉的、单一模态的区域，与胃的缓慢（0.05 Hz）肌电节律显示出相位同步。这些胃-脑相互作用具有广泛的意义，从进食行为到功能性胃肠疾病。然而，与其他内感受信号（例如心率）及其与大脑的关系相比，这些胃-脑相互作用的可靠性、它们对运动等伪影的稳健性以及它们是否可以推广到新的样本知之甚少。在这里，我们在 43 名同时接受胃电图（EGG）、脑 fMRI 和脉搏血氧仪检查的受试者中检查了这些方面。我们还在一个高度采样个体的开放数据集上重复了所有分析。我们发现了一组在控制非灰质（GM）信号、头部运动和心脏伪影后与 EGG 信号耦合的大脑区域。这些区域与以前的工作有显著重叠。然而，我们还表明，在进行混杂回归之前，胃网络的空间范围在很大程度上被高估了。最后，我们发现，在单独估计时，大脑和胃信号都具有很高的测试-重测可靠性，但胃-脑同步的测量值却没有。总之，这些结果为未来研究胃-脑相互作用以及更好地理解胃网络的作用提供了方法学框架。
