White matter integrity and its association with affective and interpersonal symptoms in borderline personality disorder

Abstract

Background Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder involving a range of symptoms including marked affective instability and disturbances in interpersonal interactions. Neuroimaging studies are beginning to provide evidence of altered processing in fronto-limbic network deficits in the disorder, however, few studies directly examine structural connections within this circuitry together with their relation to proposed causative processes and clinical features. Methods In the current study, we investigated whether individuals with BPD (n = 20) have deficits in white matter integrity compared to a matched group of healthy controls (n = 18) using diffusion tensor MR..