Altered White Matter and Sensory Response to Bodily Sensation in Female-to-Male Transgender Individuals
| Autor: | Rosalynn Landazuri, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Pavitra Viswanathan, Laura K. Case, David Brang |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Adult
Male medicine.medical_specialty Brain activity and meditation Sensory system Audiology Somatosensory system Transgender Persons 050105 experimental psychology Article Developmental psychology Perceptual Disorders 03 medical and health sciences Young Adult 0302 clinical medicine Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Supramarginal gyrus Sensation medicine Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Alien hand syndrome General Psychology medicine.diagnostic_test Secondary somatosensory cortex 05 social sciences Magnetoencephalography Middle Aged medicine.disease White Matter Female Psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Archives of sexual behavior. 46(5) |
| ISSN: | 1573-2800 |
| Popis: | While most people take identification with their body for granted, conditions like phantom limb pain, alien hand syndrome, and xenomelia suggest that the feeling of bodily congruence is constructed and susceptible to alteration. Individuals with xenomelia typically experience one of their limbs as over-present and aversive, leading to a desire to amputate the limb. Similarly, many transgender individuals describe their untreated sexed body parts as incongruent and aversive, and many experience phantom body parts of the sex they identify with (Ramachandran, 2008). This experience may relate to differences in brain representation of the sexed body part, as suggested in xenomelia (McGeoch et al., 2011). We utilized magnetoencephalography imaging to record brain activity during somatosensory stimulation of the breast – a body part that feels incongruent to most pre-surgical female-to-male (FtM) identified transgender individuals – and the hand, a body part that feels congruent. We measured the sensory evoked response in right hemisphere somatosensory and body-related brain areas and found significantly reduced activation in the supramarginal gyrus and secondary somatosensory cortex but increased activation at the temporal pole for chest sensation in the FtM group (N = 8) relative to non-transgender females (N = 8). In addition, we found increased white matter coherence in the supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole and decreased white matter diffusivity in the anterior insula and temporal pole in the FtM group. These findings suggest that dysphoria related to gender-incongruent body parts in FtM individuals may be tied to differences in neural representation of the body and altered white matter connectivity. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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