A Study Of Changes In Grey Matter In Women With Primary Dysmenorrhen

Primary dysmenorrhea(PDM, menstrual pain without pelvic abnormality) is the most common gynecological condition which caused cramping pain and enhanced pain sensitivity during the menstrual cycle in adolescent girls and a common problem in women of reproductive age. It is characterized by cramping pain beginning with the onset of menses and lasting one to three days. In general, the female adolescent with primary dysmenorrhea take a large part of the population of patients. About 15 percent of adolescent girls report severe dysmenorrheal, and it is the leading cause of recurrent short-term school absenteeism in adolescent girls in 2005. The primary dysmenorrheal serve as a common gynecological disorder, the severe one can bring the extra medical burden. Recently, due to the rapid development of medical imaging technology, especially the widely used technology of magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, several studies have shown about patients with primary dysmenorrheal. These research based on patients with primary dysmenorrheal that the areas of gray matter involved the information of pain transmission, a higher level of sensory processing, pain modulation decreased, involved endocrine regulation of regional increased. At same time, the areas of metabolism that involved in pain processing in the brain increased, the region involved in sensorimotor of area decreased. However, most of these studies were based on PET and VBM, few studies on patients with abnormal changes on cortex thickness. Therefore, we used the nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR) imaging technology to research the anatomical structures in patients with primary dysmenorrheal, these structures including the cortex thickness, volume of gray matter and subcortical volume.Firstly, we analyzed the abnormal changes between primary dysmenorrheal patients and normal control group in the menstrual period by the commonly used analysis of Cortex Thickness Analysis and Voxel-Based Borphometry. By using the method of correlation and regression analysis, we obtained significant abnormal changes of areas, including: the parietal cortex, parietal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal cortex, postcentral cortex, insula cortex, cuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, media orbitofrontal cortex, in the right posterior cingulate cortex, parahippocampal cortex, superior temporal cortex, inferior parietal cortex, precentral gyrus, middle temporal cortex, superior parietal cortex,precuneus, insula cortex.In addition, we found the significant differences in subcortical region, including: the left side of the caudate nucleus, left thalamus, the left amygdala, and brain stem. These structures constituted the network that helped us understand the pathogenesis of primary dysmenorrheal in neurological, and suggested that under the different brain’s modal analysis method for the pathological mechanism of primary dysmenorrheal was possible for the deeper research.Secondly, the based on voxel morphometry research that the gray matter changes of the patients with primary dysmenorrheal. The result shown that the left insula cortex, the left orbitofrontal cortex, the middle cingulate cortex and cerebelum. In addition, the overlap regions associated with previous research. In a word, these results indicated that abnormal changes of gray matter for patients with primary dysmenorrhea and to revealed the primary dysmenorrheal in the pathogenesis of the abnormal changes of brain gray matter provided further validation.