Analysis of EEG Characteristics and Coherence in Patients Diagnosed as Borderline Personality

Borderline Personality Disorder: Risk Factors and Early Detection

Personality disorders (PDs) exert a great toll on health resources, and this is especially true for borderline personality disorder (BPD). As all PDs, BPD arises during adolescence or young adulthood. It is therefore important to detect the presence of this PD in its earlier stages in order to initiate appropriate treatment, thus ameliorating the prognosis of this condition. This review aims to highlight the issues associated with BPD diagnosis in order to promote its early detection and treatment. To do so, we conducted a search on PubMed database of current evidence regarding BPD early diagnosis, focusing on risk factors, which represent important conditions to assess during young patient evaluation, and on diagnostic tools that can help the clinician in the assessment process. Our findings show how several risk factors, both environmental and genetic/neurobiological, can contribute to the onset of BPD and help identify at-risk patients who need careful monitoring. They also highlight the importance of a careful clinical evaluation aided by psychometric tests. Overall, the evidence gathered confirms the complexity of BDP early detection and its crucial importance for the outcome of this condition.

Inhibitory control under emotional contexts in women with borderline personality disorder: An electrophysiological study

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by emotional dysregulation and difficulties in cognitive control. Inhibitory control, meanwhile, is modulated by the presence of emotional stimuli. The objective of the present study was to examine the effects of implicit emotional contexts on response inhibition in BPD patients. Participants performed a response inhibition task (Go-NoGo) under 3 background context conditions: neutral, pleasant and unpleasant. Behavioral performance did not differed between groups. Significantly higher P3NoGo amplitudes, shorter N2 latencies and lower global connectivity were observed in the patients regardless of the emotional valence of the background images compared to controls. In addition, higher P3NoGo amplitudes were correlated with more pronounced psychopathological symptoms. Emotional contexts enhanced N2 amplitudes compared to neutral ones in both groups. Results indicate that BPD required greater neural effort to successfully perform the inhibitory task. Finally, BPD showed lower synchronization between cortical regions, which may indicate a disruption in the effective temporal coupling of distributed areas associated with emotional stimuli-processing during both response and response inhibition.