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Brain responses to emotional stimuli in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)

Journal of Neurology volume 254, pages 519–527 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive motor neuron disease, affects movement and communication abilities and emotional processing. Subjective ratings of emotional stimuli depicting social interactions and facial expressions differed significantly between ALS patients and healthy controls in a previous study with a reduction of negative emotional valence (pleasantness) and lower subjective arousal (excitement) in ALS patients. In the present study, sixty similar emotional slides were presented to 13 ALS patients, 15 matched healthy controls and six tetraplegic patients. Subjective reports of valence and arousal as well as brain responses to the affective pictures using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were measured. The picture series was presented twice with a 6-months interval to investigate effects of disease progression. ALS patients presented an increased brain response in the right supramarginal area and a reduced brain response in extrastriate visual areas at both measurements compared with healthy controls. Within the ALS patients' group a reduction of brain responses in the anterior insula at the follow-up was correlated with the subjective arousal. The reduced response in the anterior insula is tentatively interpreted as indicating reduced arousal during the course of the disease at the neural and behavioural level. The reduction of activity in extrastriate visual areas might be similarly interpreted. The increased brain response in the right supramarginal area of ALS patients might represent an altered sensitivity to social-emotional cues.

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Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Neurophysiology, University of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 47, 89081, Ulm, Germany

    Dorothée Lulé, Volker Diekmann & Jan Kassubek

  2. Dept. of Neurology, University of Ulm, Germany

    Dorothée Lulé, Volker Diekmann, Jan Kassubek & Albert C. Ludolph

  3. Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Germany

    Dorothée Lulé, Silke Anders, Andrea Kübler & Niels Birbaumer

  4. National Institutes of Health, NINDS Human Cortical Physiology, Bethesda, US

    Niels Birbaumer

Authors
  1. Dorothée Lulé
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  2. Volker Diekmann
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  3. Silke Anders
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  4. Jan Kassubek
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  5. Andrea Kübler
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  6. Albert C. Ludolph
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  7. Niels Birbaumer
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Correspondence to Dorothée Lulé.

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Lulé, D., Diekmann, V., Anders, S. et al. Brain responses to emotional stimuli in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). J Neurol 254, 519–527 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-006-0409-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-006-0409-3

Key words

  • amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)
  • social information processing
  • emotions
  • fMRI