Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland ; Center of Education and Research (COEUR), Psychiatric Services of the County of St. Gallen-North, Wil, Switzerland ; Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland.
Neuroimage Clin. 2013 Aug 29;3:531-8. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2013.08.009. eCollection 2013.
Many patients with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) feel overwhelmed in situations with high levels of sensory input, as in crowded situations with complex sensory characteristics. These difficulties might be related to subtle sensory processing deficits similar to those that have been found for sounds in electrophysiological studies.
Visual processing was investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging in trauma-exposed participants with (N = 18) and without PTSD (N = 21) employing a picture-viewing task.
Activity observed in response to visual scenes was lower in PTSD participants 1) in the ventral stream of the visual system, including striate and extrastriate, inferior temporal, and entorhinal cortices, and 2) in dorsal and ventral attention systems (P < 0.05, FWE-corrected). These effects could not be explained by the emotional salience of the pictures.
Visual processing was substantially altered in PTSD in the ventral visual stream, a component of the visual system thought to be responsible for object property processing. Together with previous reports of subtle auditory deficits in PTSD, these findings provide strong support for potentially important sensory processing deficits, whose origins may be related to dysfunctional attention processes.
许多创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）患者在高感官输入的情况下感到不知所措，例如在具有复杂感官特征的拥挤环境中。这些困难可能与微妙的感官处理缺陷有关，类似于在电生理研究中发现的声音缺陷。
我们采用图片观察任务，利用功能磁共振成像对经历过创伤的 PTSD 患者（N=18）和非 PTSD 患者（N=21）进行了视觉处理研究。
与非 PTSD 患者相比，1）PTSD 患者的视觉系统腹侧流，包括纹状和纹外、下颞叶和内嗅皮质，以及 2）背侧和腹侧注意系统的活动较低（P<0.05，FWE 校正）。这些效应不能用图片的情绪显著性来解释。
PTSD 患者的视觉处理在腹侧视觉流中发生了实质性改变，该系统被认为负责物体属性处理。结合 PTSD 中听觉缺陷的先前报告，这些发现为潜在的重要感官处理缺陷提供了有力支持，其起源可能与注意力过程的功能障碍有关。
