Title |
The Inverse Relationship between the Microstructural Variability of Amygdala-Prefrontal Pathways and Trait Anxiety Is Moderated by Sex
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Published in |
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, November 2016
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DOI | 10.3389/fnsys.2016.00093 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
M. Justin Kim, Annemarie C. Brown, Alison M. Mattek, Samantha J. Chavez, James M. Taylor, Amy L. Palmer, Yu-Chien Wu, Paul J. Whalen |
Abstract |
Anxiety impacts the quality of everyday life and may facilitate the development of affective disorders, possibly through concurrent alterations in neural circuitry. Findings from multimodal neuroimaging studies suggest that trait-anxious individuals may have a reduced capacity for efficient communication between the amygdala and the ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC). A diffusion-weighted imaging protocol with 61 directions was used to identify lateral and medial amygdala-vPFC white matter pathways. The structural integrity of both pathways was inversely correlated with self-reported levels of trait anxiety. When this mask from our first dataset was then applied to an independent validation dataset, both pathways again showed a consistent inverse relationship with trait anxiety. Importantly, a moderating effect of sex was found, demonstrating that the observed brain-anxiety relationship was stronger in females. These data reveal a potential neuroanatomical mediator of previously documented functional alterations in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity that is associated with trait anxiety, which might prove informative for future studies of psychopathology. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
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United States | 2 | 40% |
Unknown | 3 | 60% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
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Scientists | 3 | 60% |
Members of the public | 2 | 40% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
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Unknown | 45 | 100% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
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Student > Ph. D. Student | 12 | 27% |
Student > Bachelor | 7 | 16% |
Student > Doctoral Student | 5 | 11% |
Other | 3 | 7% |
Researcher | 3 | 7% |
Other | 11 | 24% |
Unknown | 4 | 9% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
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Psychology | 17 | 38% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 6 | 13% |
Neuroscience | 6 | 13% |
Nursing and Health Professions | 2 | 4% |
Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 1 | 2% |
Other | 4 | 9% |
Unknown | 9 | 20% |