Study Of ALFF-Based Resting-State FMRI In College Students Wih Alexithymia

Alexithymia signifies a personality construct representing difficulties in identifying and expressing feelings, a scarce imagination, and an externally oriented way of thinking. To analyze the altered spontaneous neural activity of the brain using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in individuals with Alexithymia. Resting-state fMRI was conducted in 20 alexithymia and 23 healthy control subjects.This study was to explore the abnormal spontaneous activity shown with amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and fractional ALFF (fALFF). Compared with controls, alexithymia showed significantly increased ALFF in right lingual, right calcarine, left superior temporal, left postcentral gyrus, left supplementary motor area, ALFF value in the bilateral putamen, left triangularis inferior frontal gyri, right caudat, left superior medial frontal gyrus, bilateral anterior cingulate, right precuneus, left inferior parietal gyrus significantly decreased in alexithymia. Meanwhile, fALFF value in the left parahippocampal gyrus significantly increased. fALFF value in the bilateral caudate, left putamen, left anterior cingulate significantly decreased. After the ALFF and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF).Then the correlations between ALFF/fALFF values and TAS-20 total scores were analyzed. TAS-20 score for alexithymia was positively correlated with ALFF values of the right thalamu and negatively correlated with that bilateral caudate, left medial superior frontal gyrus, right orbito superior frontal gyrus, supplementary motor area. The fALFF values of the right parahippocampal of alexithymia were positively correlated with TAS-20 and right putamen, right insula, left supplementary motor area negatively correlated with TAS-20 score. These results indicate that spontaneous neural activity in local regions may play an important role in the pathophysiology of alexithymia.