Thania Balducci MSc

Research description:

 Title: Brain activity related to emotional regulation in fibromyalgia

Project: Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain condition frequently accompanied by psychiatric disorders. There is an intricate relationship between pain, emotion regulation and psychiatric disorders. The literature suggests the presence of alterations in emotional regulation in patients with fibromyalgia such as increased emotional intensity and arousal for emotional stimuli. These patients also show preference for using non-adaptative emotional regulation strategies, such as suppression, over the more-adaptative-strategy cognitive reappraisal. The aim of this project is to evaluate the brain activity and functional connectivity in fibromyalgia using functional MRI during an emotional regulation task.

Title: Depression and anxiety prevalence in central sensitization syndromes: systematic review and meta-analysis

Project: The term central sensitivity syndromes has appeared recently to group different medical conditions characterized by the absence of a structural pathology, but sharing central sensitization as a common mechanism. Central sensitization has been defined as a central nervous system hyperexcitement state due to an amplification of neural signaling involving changes in synaptic activity, irrespective of the presence or intensity of a peripheral input.

Psychological factors, among others, may play a role in predisposing to, or triggering, central sensitization; but also, the presence of central sensitization syndromes predispose to the appearance of psychological symptoms as depression and anxiety, being a bidirectional relationship. The mechanism for this association is not well understood. Even when multiple systematic reviews and meta-analysis about depression and anxiety prevalence for some of the central sensitivity syndromes exist, we want to summarize these prevalences under the unifying construct of central sensitivity syndromes, allowing to have a notion of the behavior of the comorbidity of these syndromes and depression and anxiety in a population level.