14 DAY TRIAL // The brains of people suffering from a condition known as body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) tend to process visual information in a very skewed and distorted way. A new study is not suggesting that this type of perception may also extend to inanimate objects as well.
Researchers draw attention to the fact that BDD is an extremely serious mental illness, which is oftentimes debilitating, and can even lead to suicide. On numerous occasions, patients tend to engage in time-consuming, obsessive behaviors, which can have nefarious consequences.
The most often-encountered symptom of BDD is the fact that patients tend to concentrate their entire attention on minute details on their face, such as as single dot, blemish or bump. The entire picture, featuring the combined features of their faces, eludes them entirely.
Repetitive, time-consuming and obsessive behaviors – such as prolonged examinations in the mirror – oftentimes accompany the disorder. Many patients don't go out of the house unless their faces are covered up, and many do not interact with other people as all.
The fact that they feel hideous at all times causes many to contemplate suicide, to become depressive, or develop obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), say investigators at the University of California in Los Angles (UCLA).
A whopping 2 percent of the entire population might suffer from lighter or more severe forms of BDD. In most cases, the condition does accompany OCD, says UCLA assistant professor of psychiatry Dr. Jamie Feusner, the first author of the new study.
In the studies the expert and his team conducted on BDD patients, it was determined that the latter displayed reduced levels of neural activity when their brains were processing holistic visual elements.
This means that they lost their ability to see and perceive things properly when their brain came to creating a clear, big-picture-like perspective of faces. Interestingly, the team found the same patterns when the patients were looking at inanimate objects, PsychCentral reports.
“No study until this one has investigated the brain’s activity for visually processing objects in people with BDD,” explains Feusner, who also holds an appointment as the director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Intensive Treatment Program at UCLA.
“This is an important step to figuring out what’s going wrong in the brains of people with BDD so we can develop treatments to change their perceptions of themselves,” he concldues.
Details of the new work were published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Medicine.