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SHR Neuro Cancer Cardio Lipid Metab Microb
Taxer, B; de Castro-Carletti, EM; von Piekartz, H; Leis, S; Christova, M; Armijo-Olivo, S.
Facial recognition, laterality judgement, alexithymia and resulting central nervous system adaptations in chronic primary headache and facial pain-A systematic review and meta-analysis
J ORAL REHABIL. 2024;
Doi: 10.1111/joor.13742
Web of Science
PubMed
FullText
FullText_MUG
- Leading authors Med Uni Graz
- Taxer Bernhard
- Co-authors Med Uni Graz
- Christova Monica
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- Abstract:
- IntroductionPatients with chronic headaches and chronic oro-facial pain commonly present psychosocial issues that can affect social interactions. A possible reason could be that patients with these disorders might present impairments in facial recognition, laterality judgement and also alexithymia. However, a systematic review summarizing the effects of facial emotion recognition, laterality judgement and alexithymia in individuals with headaches and oro-facial pain is still not available.AimThe main objective of this systematic review (SR) and meta-analysis (MA) was to compile and synthesize the evidence on the occurrence of alexithymia, deficits in laterality or left-right (LR) recognition and/or facial emotion recognition (FER) in patients with chronic headache and facial pain.MethodsElectronic searches were conducted in five databases (up to September 2023) and a manual search to identify relevant studies. The outcomes of interest were alexithymia scores, speed and accuracy in LR and/or FER, or any other quantitative data assessing body image distortions. The screening process, data extraction, risk of bias and data analysis were performed by two independent assessors following standards for systematic reviews.ResultsFrom 1395 manuscripts found, only 34 studies met the criteria. The overall quality/certainty of the evidence was very low. Although the results should be interpreted carefully, individuals with chronic headaches showed significantly higher levels of alexithymia when compared to healthy individuals. No conclusive results were found for the other variables of interest.ConclusionAlthough the overall evidence from this review is very low, people with chronic primary headaches and oro-facial pain could be regularly screened for alexithymia to guarantee appropriate management. The systematic review and meta-analysis on chronic primary headache and facial pain shows that patients with migraine, tension headache and orofacial pain are more likely to have alexithymia than healthy individuals (with very low to low certainty). Chronic migraine patients in particular show increased alexithymia, emphasizing the need for screening, but there are methodological challenges and a lack of high-quality studies on face-related dysfunction.image
- Find related publications in this database (Keywords)
- alexithymia
- chronic headache
- face-related dysfunctions
- facial emotion recognition
- laterality judgement