Resilience and cortical thickness: a MRI study.

Resilience and cortical thickness: a MRI study. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2018 Dec 12;: Authors: Kahl M, Wagner G, de la Cruz F, Köhler S, Schultz CC Abstract Resilience is defined as the psychological resistance which enables the processing of stress and adverse life events and thus constitutes a key factor for the genesis of psychiatric illness. However, little is known about the morphological correlates of resilience in the human brain. Hence, the aim of this study is to examine the neuroanatomical expression of resilience in healthy individuals. 151 healthy subjects were recruited and had to complete a resilience-specific questionnaire (RS-11). All of them underwent a high-resolution T1-weighted MRI in a 3T scanner. Fine-grained cortical thickness was analyzed using FreeSurfer. We found a significant positive correlation between the individual extent of resilience and cortical thickness in a right hemispherical cluster incorporating the lateral occipital cortex, the fusiform gyrus, the inferior parietal cortex as well as the middle and inferior temporal cortex, i.e., a reduced resilience is associated with a decreased cortical thickness in these areas. We lend novel evidence for a direct linkage between psychometric resilience and local cortical thickness. Our findings in a sample of healthy individuals show that a lower resilience is associated with a lower cortical thickness in anatomical areas are known to be involve...
Source: European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci Source Type: research