title: The relationship between cortical thickness and body mass index differs between women with anorexia nervosa and healthy controls.
abstract: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by extreme underweight. Studies conducted with structural MRI found reductions in brain volumes in several areas, but results are mixed. Cortical thickness has shown in other samples specific correlations with BMI in different BMI ranges. In this study, we applied a well validated procedure implemented in Freesurfer software toolkit to investigate cortical thickness in a sample of 21 patients with AN and 18 healthy controls, focusing on group differences and on the relationship between BMI and cortical thickness. Cortical thickness was reduced in patients with AN, but group differences did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. The relationship between BMI and cortical thickness was significantly different in patients with AN compared to controls in the left superior parietal/occipital cortex and left post central cortex. These findings suggest that the relationship between cortical thickness and BMI in patients with AN with less than two years of illness duration significantly differs from that in controls and possible biological mechanisms that may explain this relationship are discussed.
authors.affiliation: UT Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UT Houston Medical School, Houston, TX, USA. Electronic address: luca.lavagnino@uth.tmc.edu.
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lavagnino
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Amianto
authors.affiliation: UT Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UT Houston Medical School, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Benson
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mwangi
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: D'Agata
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Angela
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Spalatro
authors.affiliation: UT Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UT Houston Medical School, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Giovana B
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Zunta Soares
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Giovanni Abbate
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Daga
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mortara
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Secondo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fassino
authors.affiliation: UT Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UT Houston Medical School, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Jair C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Soares
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000856:Anorexia Nervosa / Q000473:pathology*; D015992:Body Mass Index; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000473:pathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Anorexia; Body mass index; Body weight; Cortical thickness; Eating disorders; MRI; Neuroimaging