Novel MRI methodology to detect human whole-brain connectivity changes after ingestion of fructose or glucose

Abstract

A novel MRI protocol has been developed to investigate the differential effects of glucose or fructose consumption on whole-brain functional brain connectivity. A previous study has reported a decrease in the fMRI blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal of the hypothalamus following glucose ingestion, but due to technical limitations, was restricted to a single slice covering the hypothalamus, and thus unable to detect whole-brain connectivity. In another previous study, a protocol was devised to acquire whole-brain fMRI data following food intake, but only after restricting image acquisition to an MR sampling or repetition time (TR) of 20s, making the protocol unsuitable to detect functional connectivity above 0.025Hz. We have successfully implemented a continuous 36-min, 40 contiguous slices, whole-brain BOLD acquisition protocol on a 3T scanner with TR=4.5s to ensure detection of up to 0.1Hz frequencies for whole-brain functional connectivity analysis. Human data were acquired first with ingestion of water only, followed by a glucose or fructose drink within the scanner, without interrupting the scanning. Whole-brain connectivity was analyzed using standard correlation methodology in the 0.01-0.1 Hz range. The correlation coefficient differences between fructose and glucose ingestion among targeted regions were converted to t-scores using the water-only correlation coefficients as a null condition. Results show a dramatic increase in the hypothalamic connectivity to the hippocampus, amygdala, insula, caudate and the nucleus accumben for fructose over glucose. As these regions are known to be key components of the feeding and reward brain circuits, these results suggest a preference for fructose ingestion.