What role do neurotransmitters play in BDD?

What role do neurotransmitters play in BDD?

Jamie Feusner (Psychiatrist, Professor, UCLA) gives expert video advice on: What causes BDD?; Is BDD a brain disease?; What do MRI images tell us about the brains of people with BDD? and more...

Neurotransmitters are chemicals that the brain uses for signalling and they are involved in all the brain processes that we have. How it is involved in BDD we don't actually know exactly how they are involved. There are different neurotransmitters, for example, serotonin, where when you change the functioning a bit, for example, by giving a medication, serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that patient's symptoms can actually get better. We know that dopamine is involved in psychotic processes like in schizophrenia, for example, and people with BDD can have delusions. They have a fixed false belief and so in that way it is possible that dopamine is also involved in some of these delusional thoughts but we don't know exactly. We really need to do more research on these neurotransmitters to find out if and how they may be connected to BDD.