Evidence of abnormal amygdala functioning in borderline personality disorder: a functional MRI study.

Background: Intense and rapidly changing mood states are a major feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD); however, there have only been a few studies investigating affective processing in BPD, and in particular no neurofunctional correlates of abnormal emotional processing have been identified so far.

Methods: Six female BPD patients without additional major psychiatric disorder and six age-matched female control subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure regional cerebral hemodynamic changes following brain activity when viewing 12 standardized emotionally aversive slides compared to 12 neutral slides, which were presented in random order.

Results: Our main finding was that BPD subjects but not control subjects were characterized by an elevated blood oxygenation level dependent fMRI signal in the amygdala on both sides.