Alterations in Resting State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Children from Mexico with and without Obesity

Motivation: Obesity and its associated comorbidities represent a health risk to population. This is even more relevant to children, as it can affect their cognitive development. Goal(s): Understanding the neurological pathophysiology of infant obsity is of paramount interest. Approach: Find differences in functional connectivity between infant obese and normoweight groups. This using Resting State and ROI to ROI analysesResults: Both groups presented the 15 RS-networks except for the Executive Control Network for the obese. The obese groups recruited three times more brain regions for the different RS-networks. ROI-to-ROI analysis presented larger number of connections for the Normoweight involving the Cerebellum and the Left-Inferior-Gyrus. Impact: This is a first step in a larger project in which cognitive deficits of children associated with obesity are correlated to brain function through MRI and cytokine measurements. Here we establish ground differences between obese and normoweight cohorts.