Cognitive Impairment in MASLD is associated with Amygdala-Related Connectivity Dysfunction in the Prefrontal and Sensory Cortex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is a common metabolism-related multisystem clinical disorder, often accompanied by a high comorbidity of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Increasing evidence suggests that the amygdala is crucial in cognitive processing during metabolic dysfunction. Nevertheless, the role of the amygdala in the neural mechanisms of MASLD with MCI (MCI_MASLD) remains unclear. METHODS: A total of 74 MASLD patients (43 with MCI_MASLD and 31 without MCI [nonMCI_MASLD]) and 62 demographic-matched healthy controls (HC) were enrolled. All participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans and psychological scale assessments. Liver fat content and blood index measurements were performed on the patients. Using the bilateral amygdala as seeds, the seed-based functional connectivity (FC) maps were calculated and one-way analysis of covariance with post hoc tests was performed to investigate the difference among the three groups. RESULTS: Compared to nonMCI_MASLD patients, MCI_MASLD patients demonstrated enhanced FC between the right amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), while reduced FC between the left amygdala and the left supplementary motor area (SMA). Interestingly, the FC values of the mPFC were correlated with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scale (MoCA) scores and liver controlled attenuation parameters, and the FC values of the SMA were also correlated with the MoCA scores. Furthermore, the FC values between the bilateral amygdala and regions within the frontal-limbic-mesencephalic circuits were higher in MASLD patients when compared to HC. CONCLUSIONS: Aberrant FC of the amygdala can provide potential neuroimaging markers for MCI in MASLD, which is associated with amygdala-related connectivity disturbances in areas related to cognition and sensory processing. Moreover, visceral fat accumulation may exacerbate brain dysfunction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".