Related Experiment Videos
Enhanced preattentive central nervous system reactivity in irritable bowel syndrome
Steven M Berman1, Bruce D Naliboff, Lin Chang
1CURE Digestive Diseases Research Center, Department of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles 90073, USA.
Objective:
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common functional disorder characterized by enhanced perceptual sensitivity and hypervigilance toward afferent signals from the viscera. We hypothesize that the increased responsiveness of IBS patients is a generalized phenomenon applying to stimuli other than visceral and attempt to demonstrate increased responsiveness to sounds as measured by the P1 scalp potential.
Methods:
Event-related potentials were recorded from IBS patients and control subjects in an auditory task requiring detection of rare pitch targets in a designated ear. Visual words served as targets in an additional block.
Results:
Compared to control subjects, IBS patients displayed a robust increase in the amplitude of the P1 scalp potential elicited by both attended and unattended sounds.
Conclusions:
Enhanced P1 indicates preattentive central nervous system dishabituation in response to repeated sounds. A generalized preattentive increase in central nervous system reactivity may be a feature that IBS shares with several anxiety disorders that frequently co-occur in these patients.