Whole-brain functional connectivity correlates of obesity phenotypes

Dysregulated neural mechanisms in reward and somatosensory circuits result in an increased appetitive drive for and reduced inhibitory control of eating, which in turn causes obesity. Despite many studies investigating the brain mechanisms of obesity, the role of macroscale whole-brain functional connectivity remains poorly understood. Here, we identified a neuroimaging-based functional connectivity pattern associated with obesity phenotypes by using functional connectivity analysis combined with machine learning in a large-scale (n ~ 2,400) dataset spanning four independent cohorts. We found that brain regions containing the reward circuit positively associated with obesity phenotypes, while brain regions for sensory processing showed negative associations. Our study introduces a novel perspective for understanding how the whole-brain functional connectivity correlates with obesity phenotypes. Furthermore, we demonstrated the generalizability of our findings by correlating the functional connectivity pattern with obesity phenotypes in three independent datasets containing subjects of multiple ages and ethnicities. Our findings suggest that obesity phenotypes can be understood in terms of macroscale whole-brain functional connectivity and have important implications for the obesity neuroimaging community.