Atypical brain asymmetry in human situs inversus: Gut feeling or real evidence?

Abstract

The alignment of visceral and brain asymmetry observed in some vertebrate species raises the question of whether this association also exists in humans. While the visceral and brain systems may have developed asymmetry for different reasons, basic visceral left–right differentiation mechanisms could have been duplicated to establish brain asymmetry. We describe the main phenotypical anomalies and the general mechanism of left–right differentiation of vertebrate visceral and brain laterality. Next, we systematically review the available human studies that explored the prevalence of atypical behavioral and brain asymmetry in visceral situs anomalies, which almost exclusively involved participants with the mirrored visceral organization (situs inversus). The data show no direct link between human visceral and brain functional laterality as most participants with situs inversus show the typical population bias for handedness and brain functional asymmetry, although an increased prevalence of functional crowding may be present. At the same time, several independent studies present evidence for a possible relation between situs inversus and the gross morphological asymmetry of the brain torque with potential differences between subtypes of situs inversus with ciliary and non-ciliary etiologies.