Do you understand social anxiety disorders? May be related to brain structure.

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. Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), also known as social phobia, is a severe, disabling, widespread anxiety disorder with chronic course and complex pathophysiology characterized by persistent fear in one or more social situations where strangers are in contact with or others evaluate themselves.
It is estimated that 7% to 13.3% of people suffer from SAD at some point, and that social anxiety disorder is a highly common symptom of major mental illnesses such as autism, depression, and schizophrenia, seriously endangering the daily lives and work of patients.
, however, there is insufficient attention paid to SAD, only 25% of treatments are received, and treatment is often only moderately effective, so understanding the neurobiological changes behind the disease is critical to improving treatment interventions in clinical practice.
past studies, neuroimaging studies have found differences in brain structure between SAD patients and healthy control groups.
, however, the results were mixed due to small sample sizes, different patient characteristics (co-diseases with other mental illnesses, accompanying treatment and gender ratios) and differences in methods.
a recent research paper published in EBioMedicine that complements this field and provides additional insights into the neurobiological characteristics of the disease.
photo source: The authors investigated gray matter characteristics in SAD patients with age and gender-matched health control groups, extending previous studies in two ways.
First, the sample selected SAD patients who had no co-disease and were not treated, and second, the authors used FreeSurfer software to study two distinct characteristics of grayscale at the whole brain level: cortological thickness (CT) and cortological surface area (CSA).
results show that CT and CSA change mainly in the same brain region: SAD patients with a thinner cortical grayskin (PFC) in the bi-sided pre-temorithal cortical cortical cortical grayskin, but CSA is larger.
addition, the left side of the SAD patient's left side is raised back to CSA, and the CT is unchanged.
findings suggest that SAD is associated with cortical recombination in functional areas such as emotional processing and decision-making (PFC) and social knowledge processing (STG).
addition, the authors also reported a negative correlation between CSA and SAD duration in the last period (part of the PFC).
The study identified for the first time differences in cortical morphological measurements (including CT and CSA) in adult SAD patients without co-disease at the whole brain level, complementing and extending previous SAD-related neuroimaging studies and providing some useful information for understanding the neurobiological characteristics of SAD and further characterization of candidate biomarkers in early diagnosis and targeted therapy.
, however, the study did not reveal a link between brain structure characteristics and symptoms, as well as changes in brain structure associated with treatment, which may be the future direction of research.
, this study and other recent studies in the field have revealed the importance of gray mass in SAD neurobiology.
given the variety of current findings, we believe that no final results have been obtained and that future studies should involve large sample studies to enhance the credibility of the results.
reference source 1.