Investigação dos sistemas neurais relacionados ao reconhecimento de emoções faciais em pacientes com transtorno bipolar: um estudo de morfometria baseada no voxel

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Several studies point to impairment in facial emotion recognition in bipolar patients maybe contributing for poor psychosocial functioning. In this study, in order to better understand the neurobiological processes underlying facial emotion recognition, we investigated regional structural brain abnormalities and emotion-attribution abilities in these patients. METHOD: Twenty one patients and 21 group-matched healthy comparison participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and were examined for facial emotion recognition abilities by using the Penn Emotion Recognition Test (ER40). Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was applied to investigate regional brain structural alterations. RESULTS: Relative to the healthy participants, the patients exhibited reduced gray matter volumes in the left orbitofrontal cortex and insula. The bipolar patients performed poorly on emotion-attribution tasks. We did not found correlation with poor performance in ER40 and reductions in gray matter in these regions, but we found inverse correlation with fusiform gyrus volume and facial emotion recognition tests. CONCLUSIONS: Our results contribute for the hypotheses that the imbalance in ventral prefrontal limbic networks is one of those biological models of bipolar disorder. More studies are necessary to better understand the neurobiological correlates of social dysfunction in bipolar disorder.