Neuroimaging biomarkers to associate obesity and negative emotions

Obesity is a serious medical condition highly associated with health problems such as diabetes, hypertension, and stroke. Obesity is highly associated with negative emotional states, but the relationship between obesity and emotional states in terms of neuroimaging has not been fully explored. We obtained 196 emotion task functional magnetic resonance imaging (t-fMRI) from the Human Connectome Project database using a sampling scheme similar to a bootstrapping approach. Brain regions were specified by automated anatomical labeling atlas and the brain activity (z-statistics) of each brain region was correlated with body mass index (BMI) values. Regions with significant correlation were identified and the brain activity of the identified regions was correlated with emotion-related clinical scores. Hippocampus, amygdala, and inferior temporal gyrus consistently showed significant correlation between brain activity and BMI and only the brain activity in amygdala consistently showed significant negative correlation with fear-affect score. The brain activity in amygdala derived from t-fMRI might be good neuroimaging biomarker for explaining the relationship between obesity and a negative emotional state.