D. Rangaprakash, Cara Bohon, Katherine E. Lawrence, Teena Moody, Francesca Morfini, Sahib S. Khalsa, Michael Strober, Jamie D. Feusner
Abstract
Anorexia nervosa (AN) and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) share distorted perceptions of appearance with extreme negative emotion, yet the neural phenotypes of emotion processing remain underexplored in them, and they have never been directly compared. We sought to determine if shared and disorder-specific fronto-limbic connectivity patterns characterize these disorders. FMRI data was obtained from three unmedicated groups: BDD (n = 32), weight-restored AN (n = 25), and healthy controls (HC; n = 37), while they viewed fearful faces and rated their own degree of fearfulness in response. We performed dynamic effective connectivity modeling with medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), and amygdala as regions-of-interest (ROI), and assessed associations between connectivity and clinical variables. HCs exhibited significant within-group bidirectional mPFC-amygdala connectivity, which increased across the blocks, whereas BDD participants exhibited only significant mPFC-to-amygdala connectivity (P < 0.05, family-wise error corrected). In contrast, participants with AN lacked significant prefrontal-amygdala connectivity in either direction. AN showed significantly weaker mPFC-to-amygdala connectivity compared to HCs (P = 0.0015) and BDD (P = 0.0050). The mPFC-to-amygdala connectivity was associated with greater subjective fear ratings (R2 = 0.11, P = 0.0016), eating disorder symptoms (R2 = 0.33, P = 0.0029), and anxiety (R2 = 0.29, P = 0.0055) intensity scores. Our findings, which suggest a complex nosological relationship, have implications for understanding emotion regulation circuitry in these related psychiatric disorders, and may have relevance for current and novel therapeutic approaches.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 8. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 August 2021.
All research outputs
#4,962,962
of 26,367,306 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychiatry
#2,792
of 13,087 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#85,567
of 346,277 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychiatry
#85
of 179 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,367,306 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 81st percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 13,087 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 11.6. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 346,277 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 179 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 52% of its contemporaries.
