MORPHOSTRUCTURAL CEREBRAL FEATURES OF ALEXITHYMIA

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Background: Alexithymia is a condition characterized by: 1) difficulty to identify and describe subjective feelings; 2) difficulty to distinguish between feelings and bodily sensations of emotional arousal; 3) reduced imaginative capacities, as evidenced by a paucity of fantasies; 4) an externally oriented thinking style, consisting in a tendency to focus on external events rather than inner experiences and to describe facts and actions without affective involvement; and 5) social conformity (Nemiah JC et al., 1976; Taylor GJ et al., 1991). These clinical features, originally described by Sifneos (1973) in patients with psychosomatic disorders, are to date considered to be related to a broader range of physical and psychiatric disorders (Taylor GJ et al., 1997), besides being detected in the general population as personality features (Salminen JK et al., 1999; Kokkonen P et al., 2001). Functional studies on healthy subjects showed an association between alexithymia and abnormal activity of anterior cingulate cortex, insula and medial-frontal cortex during emotional stimuli elaboration, indicating a dysfunction of frontal cortical regions in people with alexithymia (Kano F et al., 2003; Lane RD et al., 1998; Berthoz S et al., 2002). Alexithymia has been found related to smaller gray matter (GM) volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, middle temporal gyrus, anterior insula, orbitofrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus in a recent VBM study (Borsci et al., submitted) Aim: To investigate morphostructural cerebral features associated to alexithymia using advanced neuroimaging tools. Methods: We included in the study 58 subjects (29 with and 29 without alexithymia). Alexithymia was assessed with the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Subjects were consecutive normal volunteers picked among those undergoing brain MR scan at the Neuroradiology Unit of the "Citt¿ di Brescia" Hospital, Brescia. All subjects had high resolution 3D magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and multidimensional assessment included psychological and behavioural scales, as well as neurological and neuropsychological evaluations. Subjects were free of any diagnosis of neurological or psychiatric disorders at the time of the evaluations. Cortical pattern matching (CPM) will be used to better investigate cortical gray matter (GM) differences between subjects with alexithymia and subjects without it.