RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Patients with Chronic Visceral Pain Show Sex-Related Alterations in Intrinsic Oscillations of the Resting Brain JF The Journal of Neuroscience JO J. Neurosci. FD Society for Neuroscience SP 11994 OP 12002 DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5733-12.2013 VO 33 IS 29 A1 Jui-Yang Hong A1 Lisa A. Kilpatrick A1 Jennifer Labus A1 Arpana Gupta A1 Zhiguo Jiang A1 Cody Ashe-McNalley A1 Jean Stains A1 Nuwanthi Heendeniya A1 Bahar Ebrat A1 Suzanne Smith A1 Kirsten Tillisch A1 Bruce Naliboff A1 Emeran A. Mayer YR 2013 UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/29/11994.abstract AB Abnormal responses of the brain to delivered and expected aversive gut stimuli have been implicated in the pathophysiology of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a visceral pain syndrome occurring more commonly in women. Task-free resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can provide information about the dynamics of brain activity that may be involved in altered processing and/or modulation of visceral afferent signals. Fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation is a measure of the power spectrum intensity of spontaneous brain oscillations. This approach was used here to identify differences in the resting-state activity of the human brain in IBS subjects compared with healthy controls (HCs) and to identify the role of sex-related differences. We found that both the female HCs and female IBS subjects had a frequency power distribution skewed toward high frequency to a greater extent in the amygdala and hippocampus compared with male subjects. In addition, female IBS subjects had a frequency power distribution skewed toward high frequency in the insula and toward low frequency in the sensorimotor cortex to a greater extent than male IBS subjects. Correlations were observed between resting-state blood oxygen level-dependent signal dynamics and some clinical symptom measures (e.g., abdominal discomfort). These findings provide the first insight into sex-related differences in IBS subjects compared with HCs using resting-state fMRI.