An association study of multimodal neuroimage features and gene expression in adolescents with centrally mediated abdominal pain syndrome

Centrally mediated abdominal pain syndrome (CAPS) is a complex condition characterised by persistent abdominal discomfort in the absence of clear physiological abnormalities. Its aetiology remains poorly understood, but recent research has suggested that neurobiological and genetic factors may play an important role in the pathophysiology of the syndrome. We applied partial least squares regression (PLSR) to investigate the association between multimodal neuroimaging features of 313 participants and postmortem gene expression data from AIBS. Compared to HCs, we found that (1) cortical thickness of the left inferior parietal and temporal lobes, left cingulate cortex and left caudate, sulcal depth of the right lateral occipital gyrus and volume of the right parahippocampal and right insula showed significant differences, the GO biological processes associated with these differences are mainly in "cell-substrate junction"; (2) the correlation between the default mode network and the ventral attention network, the retrosplenial temporal network and the salience network, the fronto-parietal network and the right caudate are significantly increased, the GO biological processes associated with these increases are mainly in "cell junction organization"; and (3) the mean diffusivity of sub-adjacent white matter associated with cortical ROIs of frontal cortex, cingulate cortex, temporal cortex, precuneus and insula are significantly different, the associated GO biological processes are primarily in "chromatin organization". The changed characteristics of brain neuroimaging are closely related to the biological process of down-regulation or up-regulation of gene expression. Integrating the neurobiological and genetic underpinnings is crucial to provide a theoretical framework for the mechanism of CAPS in adolescents.