Neural correlates of mental disorders in adult inmates: a resting state functional connectivity study.
Violent behavior sometimes occurs in Schizophrenia and Mood Disorder, in people with Borderline and Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Psychopathy describes individuals who suffer from a profound affective deficit, including shallow emotion and inability to experience empathy, guilt or remorse.These behavioral deficits are believed to predispose psychopaths to high rates of criminal transgression and recidivism.
Advanced MR techniques have been proved of the utmost importance in investigating neuro-psychiatric disorders.
Functional and ultrastructural neuroimaging studies have shown altered function and structure of brain regions in various psychiatric conditions, contrarily to conventional magnetic resonance (MR) sequences that are generally unrevealing in patients with neurosis or psychosis.
Among mental disorders psychopathy, one of the least understood, can be associated to other mental illnesses.
Advanced MRI techniques may be useful in delineating the neurobiology of psychopathy and to differentiate changes linked specifically to psycopathy from brain functional changes associated with other mental disorders.
The aim of our project is to perform a multiparametric MR study in adult inmates with variable degrees of psycopathy and other mental disorders in order to evaluate morphologic and functional changes specifically attributable to psycopathy.
This study will include adult male subjects prospectively recruited from a cohort of prison inmates with varying degrees of psychopathy and mental disorders.
All subjects will undergo a neurocognitive and psychiatric evaluation.
MRI structural and functional data will be correlated with clinical data in order to assess how morpho-functional changes in the brain related to the Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-r), the most widely used clinimetric tool in this domain and to other mental disorders often associated to psycopathy.