Neuropsychological features of somatic symptom disorder and depression/anxiety in Taiwan: An analysis based on the comorbidity status.

Individuals with somatic symptom disorder (SSD) often have comorbid depression or anxiety, but whether SSD is associated with specific neuropsychological functions has yet to be fully examined. We analyzed which neuropsychological features are more closely associated with SSD, anxiety, and depression. In this case-control study, we recruited 140 individuals with SSD, 104 individuals with affective disorders without SSD, and 159 healthy controls in Taiwan. We collected DSM-5 diagnoses, questionnaire scores, and performance on eight tasks from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) for each participant. Several CANTAB tasks involving attention, executive function, and social cognition showed significant group differences. In the adjusted analysis, the tasks significantly associated with SSD were the Match to Sample Visual Search (MTS) and the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). Among the questionnaires, the Cognitions about Body and Health Questionnaire showed the most significant associations with the tasks, specifically with Rapid Visual Information Processing, MTS, Paired Associates Learning, Spatial Working Memory, Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift, and ERT. We conclude that the MTS and ERT tasks show significant relationships with both SSD diagnosis and related questionnaires. These tasks primarily involve selective attention and negative emotion regulation.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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