Reduced Prefrontal Gray Matter Volume and Reduced Autonomic Activity in Antisocial Personality Disorder

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Abstract
BRAIN IMAGING research on antisocial, violent offenders is beginning to reveal potentially important functional abnormalities in these subjects. Ranging from small pilot studies of 4 cases1 to group studies of more than 40 cases,2 there is increasing evidence that poor prefrontal functioning is a characteristic of violent, antisocial persons as indicated by both positron emission tomography3-5 and single-photon emission computed tomography.6,7 Nevertheless, few if any of these studies control for comorbidity of substance abuse, schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, and other psychiatric comorbidity, and all have been conducted on selected samples derived from psychiatric hospitals, prisons, or forensic settings. Unlike these functional imaging findings, there have been no prior magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of structural brain deficits in antisocial groups, and nothing is known about brain abnormalities in noninstitutionalized violent offenders.