Emotional empathy in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a behavioural and voxel-based morphometry study

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Neurology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a complex neurological disorder affecting multiple systems.
• Executive and behavioral symptoms, including social cognition deficits like impaired empathy, are increasingly recognized in ALS.
• The underlying neurostructural basis for these social cognition impairments in ALS remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate emotional and cognitive empathy in non-demented ALS patients.
• To correlate empathy performance with regional grey-matter density using voxel-based morphometry (VBM).

Main Methods:

• A non-verbal empathy task assessing emotional vs. cognitive state attribution was administered to 20 ALS patients and 56 healthy controls (HC).
• A subgroup of 14 ALS patients and 20 HC underwent voxel-based morphometry (VBM) for grey-matter density analysis.
• A control condition assessed causal relationship identification, devoid of social components.

Main Results:

• ALS patients exhibited significantly poorer emotional empathy attribution compared to HC.
• Reduced grey-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex and right inferior frontal gyrus was associated with impaired emotional empathy in ALS patients.
• No significant differences were noted in cognitive empathy or the control task.

Conclusions:

• This study provides evidence for a specific deficit in emotional empathy in ALS patients.
• The findings highlight neural damage within a limbic prefrontal network involved in emotional processing as the correlate.
• Social cognition disorders, particularly impaired emotional empathy, may serve as an early marker of cognitive dysfunction in ALS.