Brain Structures Associated With Individual Differences in Somatic Symptoms and Emotional Distress in a Healthy Sample
Dongtao Wei, Yu Liu, Kaixiang Zhuang, Jieyu Lv, Jie Meng, Jiangzhou Sun, Qunlin Chen, Wenjing Yang, Jiang Qiu
Abstract
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. In addition, 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 grey matter volumes in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior insula, somatosensory cortex and subcortical structures. Furthermore, a moderator analysis was performed to investigate the impact of recent stressful life events (moderators) on the association between specific grey matter volumes (independent variables) and emotional distress (dependent variables). Interestingly, high levels of emotional distress were associated with small volumes of the vmPFC, anterior insula and subcortical structures 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 mediating by reductions in the volume of the hippocampus. In contrast, the impact of somatic symptoms on emotional distress is mediated by the volume of the vmPFC. These results provided evidence that stress-related emotional distress and somatic symptoms may have similar neuroanatomical substrates. The volumes of the vmPFC and hippocampus play different roles in the interaction between emotional distress and somatic symptoms.