Symptom provocation involved imaginary scenarios and in vivo flooding. Excess brain activity was mapped in the medial orbitofrontal, lateral frontal, anterior temporal, anterior cingulate, and insular cortex together with basal ganglia. Limbic activations were particularly prominent. Patients with OCD had significantly less total white matter, but significantly greater total cortex and opercular volumes. Measures of childhood problems were derived by higher order principal component analysis of childhood behavioural ratings.
Personality disorders do therefore reflect longstanding personality dysfunction.
Oren puts forward the hypothesis that haem moieties and bile pigments in animals may mediate some light influences upon neuroactive gases and biological rhythms ie the concept of humoral phototransduction . Oren states that like chlorophylls the haem tetrapyrrole structure has a similar capacity to transduce photic energy. Blood flow through the retina and humoral phototransduction may offer a model for the known effects of light upon non-enucleated blind animals and people. The model has interesting possibilities for the direction of research into psychiatric disorders like seasonal affective disorder. The paper in the BJPsych calls this error rate is 'unacceptably high'.