Journal
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 14, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.492990
Keywords
stress; psychosomatic; voxel-based morphometry (VBM); cortical-limbic system; individual differences
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31571137, 31500885]
- National Outstanding young people plan
- Program for the Top Young Talents by Chongqing, Social Science Planning Project of Chongqing [2018PY80]
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [SWU119007]
- Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing [cstc2019jcyj-msxmX0520, cstc2020jcyj-msxmX0299]
- Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation [151023]
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Stress-related psychosomatic responses are viewed as important risks to our physical health. Growing evidence from structural imaging studies has implicated that stress and trauma exposures have negative effects on brain structural alterations. However, whether stress-related emotional distress and somatic symptoms are related to the structure of brain systems remains unclear. Also, stress-related somatic symptoms have adverse effects on emotional distress. In turn, emotional distress may influence somatic symptom reports via negative cognitive bias. However, whether this relationship is mediated by specific brain morphology remains poorly understood. First, we used voxel-based morphometric approaches to investigate the neuroanatomical basis underlying somatic symptoms and emotional distress in a large sample of healthy subjects (ages 18-27 years). We found that relatively high stress-related somatic symptoms were associated with reduced gray matter volumes (GMVs) in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior insula, somatosensory cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala. Furthermore, a moderator analysis was performed to investigate the impact of recent stressful life events (moderators) on the association between specific GMVs (independent variables) and emotional distress (dependent variables). Interestingly, high levels of emotional distress were associated with small volumes of the vmPFC, anterior insula, hippocampus, and amygdala in participants with experience with more recent stressful life events. Finally, we performed mediation analyses to investigate the specific brain areas that mediate the association between emotional distress and somatic symptoms. The results showed that the effect of emotional distress on somatic symptoms is mediated by reductions in the volume of the hippocampus, the impact of somatic symptoms on emotional distress is mediated by the volume of the vmPFC. These results provided evidence that higher stress-related somatic symptoms are associated with smaller volume in prefrontal, insula, and limbic regions involved in emotion, interoception, and memory processing. The vmPFC and hippocampus play different roles in the relationship between emotional distress and somatic symptoms.
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