AUTHOR=Guadagni Veronica , Burles Ford , Callahan Brandy L. , Iaria Giuseppe , Martino Davide 

TITLE=Functional connectivity of brain areas related to social cognition and anxiety in cervical dystonia

JOURNAL=Dystonia

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontierspartnerships.org/journals/dystonia/articles/10.3389/dyst.2025.14344

DOI=10.3389/dyst.2025.14344

ISSN=2813-2106

ABSTRACT=Introduction. Recent studies highlighted the importance of non-motor symptoms, including emotional processing dysfunction, in individuals with cervical dystonia (CD).The resting state functional connectivity of areas involved in emotional processing, and the modulatory role of social anxiety on this connectivity, remain unexplored in CD. We hypothesized that CD patients would have altered functional connectivity between limbic areas involved in emotional processing as compared to healthy subjects and examined how variations in social anxiety affect connectivity.Methods. 14 CD patients and 26 age-and sex-matched healthy controls completed a series of questionnaires and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Resting state functional connectivity was investigated between seeds (amygdala and insula) and whole brain ROIs, and in conventional functional networks. The modulatory role of social anxiety was investigated.Results. CD patients showed reduced intra-regional connectivity in the insula, reduced connectivity between the right insula, left parietal operculum and left central opercular cortex. CD patients also showed clear reductions in connectivity in the salience, dorsal attention and sensorimotor resting state networks, as well as modest inter-network connections between language and fronto-parietal networks. In CD patients, higher anxiety scores and performance on affect naming tasks were associated with lower connectivity between right and left insula and between right insula and left central opercular cortex.This study demonstrates that the previously observed deficits in emotional processing in CD patients may be underpinned by reduction in resting state functional