Department of Psychology, PhD Program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Sapienza University of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, Rome, Italy.
Villa von Siebenthal Neuropsychiatric Hospital and Clinic, Via della Madonnina 1, Genzano di Roma, Rome, Italy.
J Affect Disord. 2023 Nov 15;341:185-193. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.08.126. Epub 2023 Aug 30.
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is often characterized by self-injurious behaviors, with one-half to two-third of these patients reporting hypalgesic or analgesic phenomena during self-harming. Research on pain perception in BPD suggested abnormal processing of nociception either within the sensory-discriminative and/or motivational-affective systems of pain. Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether pain insensitivity could be generalized to other somatosensory submodalities. To investigate this question, 30 BPD patients and 30 matched healthy controls were enrolled in the current study and underwent a somatosensory battery composed of well-established psychophysical test assessing all the principal submodalities of somatosensation, namely pain perception (i.e., warm, cold and mechanical), discriminative touch (i.e., tactile acuity and tactile sensitivity) as well as affective touch. Results showed abnormal warm detection threshold, warm pain threshold, mechanical pain perception, and tactile sensitivity in BPD patients, but no differences emerged neither for tactile acuity nor for cold pain thresholds, cold tolerance, or for affective touch perception. Findings point to a deficit in nociception, as well as in tactile sensitivity in BPD individuals, and were discussed in relation to BPD clinical features including self-injurious behaviors.
边缘型人格障碍（BPD）的特征通常包括自伤行为，其中一半到三分之二的患者在自残时报告出现痛觉缺失或镇痛现象。BPD 中的疼痛感知研究表明，伤害感受在感觉辨别和/或动机情感系统中的处理异常。然而，目前尚不清楚疼痛不敏感性是否可以推广到其他躯体感觉亚模式。为了研究这个问题，本研究纳入了 30 名 BPD 患者和 30 名匹配的健康对照组，并进行了躯体感觉测试，该测试由经过充分验证的心理物理测试组成，评估了所有主要的躯体感觉亚模式，即疼痛感知（即，温暖、寒冷和机械）、辨别触摸（即，触觉敏锐度和触觉敏感度）以及情感触摸。结果显示，BPD 患者的温暖感觉检测阈值、温暖疼痛阈值、机械性疼痛感知和触觉敏感度异常，但在触觉敏锐度、冷痛阈值、耐寒性或情感触摸感知方面没有差异。这些发现表明 BPD 个体存在伤害感受和触觉敏感度缺陷，并与 BPD 的临床特征（包括自伤行为）进行了讨论。
