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Assessment of pedophilia using hemodynamic brain response to sexual stimuli.

Authors :
Ponseti J
Granert O
Jansen O
Wolff S
Beier K
Neutze J
Deuschl G
Mehdorn H
Siebner H
Bosinski H
Source :
Archives of general psychiatry [Arch Gen Psychiatry] 2012 Feb; Vol. 69 (2), pp. 187-94. Date of Electronic Publication: 2011 Oct 03.
Publication Year :
2012

Abstract

Context: Accurately assessing sexual preference is important in the treatment of child sex offenders. Phallometry is the standard method to identify sexual preference; however, this measure has been criticized for its intrusiveness and limited reliability.<br />Objective: To evaluate whether spatial response pattern to sexual stimuli as revealed by a change in the blood oxygen level-dependent signal facilitates the identification of pedophiles.<br />Design: During functional magnetic resonance imaging, pedophilic and nonpedophilic participants were briefly exposed to same- and opposite-sex images of nude children and adults. We calculated differences in blood oxygen level-dependent signals to child and adult sexual stimuli for each participant. The corresponding contrast images were entered into a group analysis to calculate whole-brain difference maps between groups. We calculated an expression value that corresponded to the group result for each participant. These expression values were submitted to 2 different classification algorithms: Fisher linear discriminant analysis and κ -nearest neighbor analysis. This classification procedure was cross-validated using the leave-one-out method.<br />Setting: Section of Sexual Medicine, Medical School, Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany.<br />Participants: We recruited 24 participants with pedophilia who were sexually attracted to either prepubescent girls (n = 11) or prepubescent boys (n = 13) and 32 healthy male controls who were sexually attracted to either adult women (n = 18) or adult men (n = 14).<br />Main Outcome Measures: Sensitivity and specificity scores of the 2 classification algorithms.<br />Results: The highest classification accuracy was achieved by Fisher linear discriminant analysis, which showed a mean accuracy of 95% (100% specificity, 88% sensitivity).<br />Conclusions: Functional brain response patterns to sexual stimuli contain sufficient information to identify pedophiles with high accuracy. The automatic classification of these patterns is a promising objective tool to clinically diagnose pedophilia.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1538-3636
Volume :
69
Issue :
2
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Archives of general psychiatry
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
21969422
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.130