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OBJECTIVE:
Somatic marker theory predicts that somatic cues serve intuitive decision making; however, cardiovascular symptoms are threat cues for patients with panic disorder (PD). Therefore, enhanced cardiac perception may aid intuitive decision making only in healthy individuals, but impair intuitive decision making in PD patients.
METHODS:
PD patients and age-and sex-matched volunteers without a psychiatric diagnosis (n=17, respectively) completed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) as a measure of intuitive decision making. Interindividual differences in cardiac perception were assessed with a common mental-tracking task.
RESULTS:
In line with our hypothesis, we found a pattern of opposing associations (Fisher's Z=1.78, P=0.04) of high cardiac perception with improved IGT-performance in matched control-participants (r=0.36, n=14) but impaired IGT-performance in PD patients (r=-0.38, n=13).
CONCLUSION:
Interoceptive skills, typically assumed to aid intuitive decision making, can have the opposite effect in PD patients who experience interoceptive cues as threatening, and tend to avoid them. This may explain why PD patients frequently have problems with decision making in everyday life. Screening of cardiac perception may help identifying patients who benefit from specifically tailored interventions.
Fanconi anemia (FA) is a genetically heterogeneous disorder with 22 disease-causing genes reported to date. In some FA genes, monoallelic mutations have been found to be associated with breast cancer risk, while the risk associations of others remain unknown. The gene for FA type C, FANCC, has been proposed as a breast cancer susceptibility gene based on epidemiological and sequencing studies. We used the Oncoarray project to genotype two truncating FANCC variants (p.R185X and p.R548X) in 64,760 breast cancer cases and 49,793 controls of European descent. FANCC mutations were observed in 25 cases (14 with p.R185X, 11 with p.R548X) and 26 controls (18 with p.R185X, 8 with p.R548X). There was no evidence of an association with the risk of breast cancer, neither overall (odds ratio 0.77, 95%CI 0.44–1.33, p = 0.4) nor by histology, hormone receptor status, age or family history. We conclude that the breast cancer risk association of these two FANCC variants, if any, is much smaller than for BRCA1, BRCA2 or PALB2 mutations. If this applies to all truncating variants in FANCC it would suggest there are differences between FA genes in their roles on breast cancer risk and demonstrates the merit of large consortia for clarifying risk associations of rare variants.