S29-04 Neuroimaging Study of Childhood Sexual Abuse Victims and Pseudohaypacusis in Japan

Abstract

Recently, the topic of child abuse as an issue facing Japanese society has gained considerable attention with regard to the field of medicine and education and also in scenarios that relate to child care. Recent studies reveal that emotional trauma during childhood development could be much more difficult to treat than physical abuse. Especially, childhood sexual abuse (CSA) can cause abnormal brain development and have a negative impact later in life. CSA has been associated with alterations in brain morphology using region of interest analyses that have focused on stress sensitive target regions. We found that early visual experience exerts a strong influence on the development of the mammalian visual cortex using voxelbased morphometry (VBM). Our findings indicate that exposure to CSA may also affect the development of this region, and are even apparent even in a population of subjects who are sufficiently healthy to matriculate. In this symposium, I will introduce the mechanisms of brain damage from CSA with consideration of how and when child abuse can have impact on the victims’ brains. The information presented is based on a collaborative study with the psychiatry department at Harvard University on the relationship between brain functions and the human mind. Our preliminarily report will be presented on pseudohypacusis in childhood and adolescence which is associated with increased gray matter volume in the medial frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. We therefore assert that differences in the neuroanatomical substrate of pseudohypacusis subjects result from a developmental disorder in auditory processing.