The violence profile of male mentally disordered offenders in a high secure unit in Turkiye.

Our knowledge of the severity and reoffending is limited for mentally disordered offenders, and studies generally evaluate without separation between different diagnostic groups. It was aimed to determine the general profile of mentally disordered offenders who are inpatients in a high secure psychiatry unit from Turkiye and to evaluate the factors associated with violence profiles among different diagnostic groups. According to the results the schizophrenia patients committed the most severe crimes, and intellectual disability patients had some different features from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients. History of substance misuse in the intellectual disability group (p = 0,045) and comorbid antisocial personality disorder in the bipolar disorder group (p = 0,015) were associated with increased crime severity. Substance misuse history, history of substance use during the crime, and the existence of comorbid antisocial personality disorder were associated with increased offenses in each of the three diagnosis groups. Living alone (p = 0,004) and having a suicide history (p= 0,052) were associated with the high number of offenses in the schizophrenia group. This study is the first study that compares three diagnostic groups to involve a large patient group. We believe that clinicians must evaluate these parameters for the violence risk assessment of patients.

The relationship of cortical activity induced by pain stimulation with clinical and cognitive features of somatic symptom disorder: A controlled functional near infrared spectroscopy study.

OBJECTIVE: The neurobiological correlates of Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD) introduced in the DSM-5 has been the focus of a limited investigation. We aimed to examine the cortical response to painful stimuli and its relationship to symptom severity as well as cognitive and psychological characteristics in proposed models of somatoform disorders. METHODS: We measured hemodynamic responses by 52-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy. We compared the cortical response to painful stimuli in index patients with SSD (N = 21) versus age, and gender matched healthy control subjects (N = 21). We used brush stimulation as the control condition. We analyzed the relationship of cortical activity with SSD symptom severity as well as somatosensory amplification (SSA), alexithymia, dysfunctional illness behaviour, worry, and neuroticism. RESULTS: Patients with SSD had higher somatic symptom severity, SSA, alexithymia, neuroticism, illness-related worry, and behaviour. Somatic symptom severity was predicted by a model including SSA and subjective feeling of pain in the index patients. Activity in the left-angular and right-middle temporal gyri was higher in the SSD subjects than the controls during pain stimulation. Positive correlations were detected between mean pain threshold levels and left middle occipital gyrus activity, as well as between SSA-scores and right-angular gyrus activity during pain condition in the index patients with SSD. CONCLUSION: We present the first evidence that representation of pain in terms of cortical activity is different in subjects with SSD than healthy controls. SSA has functional neuroanatomic correlates and predicts symptom severity in SSD and therefore is involved as a valid intermediate phenotype in SSD pathophysiology.

Hyperparameter-tuned prediction of somatic symptom disorder using functional near-infrared spectroscopy-based dynamic functional connectivity.

OBJECTIVE: Somatic symptom disorder (SSD) is a reflection of medically unexplained physical symptoms that lead to distress and impairment in social and occupational functioning. SSD is phenomenologically diagnosed and its neurobiology remains unsolved. APPROACH: In this study, we performed hyper-parameter optimized classification to distinguish 19 persistent SSD patients and 21 healthy controls by utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy via performing two painful stimulation experiments, individual pain threshold (IND) and constant sub-threshold (SUB) that include conditions with different levels of pain (INDc and SUBc) and brush stimulation. We estimated a dynamic functional connectivity time series by using sliding window correlation method and extracted features from these time series for these conditions and different cortical regions. MAIN RESULTS: Our results showed that we found highest specificity (85%) with highest accuracy (82%) and 81% sensitivity using an SVM classifier by utilizing connections between right superior temporal-left angular gyri, right middle frontal (MFG)-left supramarginal gyri and right middle temporal-left middle frontal gyri from the INDc condition. SIGNIFICANCE: Our results suggest that fNIRS may distinguish subjects with SSD from healthy controls by applying pain in levels of individual pain-threshold and bilateral MFG, left inferior parietal and right temporal gyrus might be robust biomarkers to be considered for SSD neurobiology.