Hormone levels are related to functional compensation in prolactinomas: A resting-state fMRI study

Abstract Prolactinomas cause dramatic fluctuations of endogenous hormone levels throughout the body. While it is not fully understood how endogenous hormone disorders affect the patient's brain, it has been well-characterized that fluctuating hormone levels can have dramatic neuropsychological effects. By employing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), we aim to investigate the whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) and its relationship with hormone levels in prolactinomas. Using whole-brain and seed-based FC analyses, we compared FC metrics between 33 prolactinoma patients and 31 healthy controls matched for age, sex, and handedness. Then we performed a partial correlation analysis to examine the relationship between FC metrics and hormone levels. Compared to healthy controls, prolactinoma patients showed significantly increased thalamocortical and cerebellar-cerebral FC. In addition, endogenous hormone levels were positively correlated with increased FC, and the hormone-FC relationships exhibited sex differences in prolactinoma patients. Our findings are the first to reveal altered FC patterns in patients with prolactinoma and to quantify the hormone-FC relationships. These results indicate the important role of hormone levels in brain functional compensation in patients with prolactinoma.