Structural alterations related to emotion dysregulation, anxiety and self-harm in adolescents borderline personality disorder. A source-based morphometry study

作者：Xiaoping Yi, Xueying Wang, Jinfan Zhang, Feifei Wu, Liying Shen, Lin Wang, Qian Xiao, Alessandro Grecucci · 发表于：Journal of Affective Disorders · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.jad.2025.121035 · 研究领域：Personality Disorders and Psychopathology、Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder、Bipolar Disorder and Treatment

OBJECTIVE: Previous research suggests that adolescents with BPD (aBPD) exhibit distinct neuroanatomical alterations, although methodological limitations such as low sample size, and the reliance on univariate massive statistical analyses, prevent conclusions. Moreover, the possibility to associate these abnormalities with clinical features has been only partially explored. This study aims to investigate structural brain differences in the largest sample of adolescents with BPD to date, using a combination of unsupervised and supervised machine learning approaches: Source-Based Morphometry (SBM) and a deep neural network whose architecture was optimized through genetic algorithms. We hypothesize that adolescents with BPD will exhibit increased gray matter volume in the default mode network (DMN) and cerebellum, strictly related with emotion dysregulation and borderline symptoms, alongside reduced gray matter in frontal control networks. METHODS: High-resolution T1-weighted structural MRI of 129 adolescents with BPD (aged 12-17) and 107 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls (HCs) were analyzed using SBM to identify networks of covarying gray matter concentration (GMC). Borderline symptomatology, difficulties in emotion regulation, anxiety-related problems, and global functioning were assessed to characterize the meaning of neural findings. RESULTS: Compared to HCs, adolescents with BPD exhibited significantly increased GMC in regions overlapping with the posteri...