Yan Z, et al. – This study dealt with the analysis of the neural association of the following cognitive bias: Patients with pathological health anxiety (PHA) displayed the likelihood of automatically interpreting the bodily sensations as the sign of a severe illness. The data revealed increased neural responding in vital structures for the processing of both emotional and cognitive aspects of body–symptom information in PHA. This, in turn, reflected the potential neural correlates of a negative somatic symptom interpretation bias.

Methods

• The functional magnetic resonance imaging adaption was applied, of a body-symptom implicit association test with symptom words in patients with PHA (n = 32) in comparison to patients with depression (n = 29) and healthy candidates (n = 35).

Results

• Patients with PHA did not vary prominently from the control groups, on the behavioral level.
• On the neural-level, nevertheless, patients with PHA in comparison to the control groups illustrated hyperactivation independent of condition in bilateral amygdala, right parietal lobe, and left nucleus accumbens.
• Patients with PHA, compared to the control groups, reported hyperactivation in bilateral posterior parietal cortex and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during incongruent (i.e., harmless) versus congruent (i.e., dangerous) categorizations of body symptoms.
• The body-symptom cues possibly triggerred the hyperactivity in salience and emotion processing brain regions in PHA.
• The hyperactivity in brain regions involved in cognitive control and conflict resolution during incongruent categorization stressed on enhanced neural effort to cope with negative implicit associations to body-symptom-related information in PHA.