Ricerc@Sapienza

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is the act of purposely harming one¿s own body tissue without the intent of suicide, and a risk factor for future suicide attempts. To answer the question asking how these patients can overcome the instinct to avoid pain, I recently performed a study, published on European Journal of Pain (Leone et al. 2021), to assess the function of the nociceptive afferent pathway in adolescent patients with NSSI (n=30), compared with a matched control group, and to register any suicide attempt, describe its prevalence and find a possible correlation between suicide and neurophysiological measures (quantitative sensory testing, laser evoked potentials, conditioned pain modulation). My results indicated that patients with NSSI had a reduced amplitude of the vertex component of laser evoked potentials and an abnormal conditioned pain modulation, and more importantly, the amplitude of the vertex component was associated with suicidal risk. The strong association of a reduced amplitude of the vertex component with suicide raise the possibility to use it as a non-invasive biomarker of suicide in self-harming adolescents. Admittedly, albeit extremely promising, my previous study presents several limitations that I've planned to address in this further study: 1) replication of data; 2) assessment of the nociceptive-specificity of the biomarker by using multimodal evoked potentials; 3) assessment of the effect of a lack of attentional drive, itself related to suicidality, on the vertex component. To do so I've planned to perform a neurophysiological study on a larger sample of adolescents with NSSI with and without a previous suicide attempt (n=50), in collaboration with the Adolescent Unit of the Child Psychiatry Department of Sapienza University, to assess somato-sensory evoked potentials, auditory evoked potentials and laser evoked potentials during a specific task to monitor attention.