Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New ResearchIntrinsic Functional Connectivity of Amygdala-Based Networks in Adolescent Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Section snippets
Method
An advantage of R-fMRI is that although scanner- and site-related variation is detectable, robust effects associated with phenotypic variables such as diagnosis are discernible when data from multiple sites are combined.21, 22, 23, 24 We exploit this robustness to combine datasets from two sites to attain sufficiently large samples of medication-free pediatric participants.
Participants (12–17 years of age) were recruited across two sites, the New York University (NYU) Child Study Center, and
Results
As shown in Table 1, no group differences were observed for sex, age, IQ, race/ethnicity, or movement (maximum displacement) during the resting state scan, or the percentage of participants from each site. Scores on the SCARED-PC were significantly higher for the GAD group than the healthy comparison group (t32 = 8.2, p< .001).
Discussion
Study findings have revealed alterations in iFC of individual amygdala subdivisions with prefrontal regions, consistent with emotion regulation models of GAD.33 Additional iFC group differences were observed in the striatum, insula, superior temporal gyrus, brainstem, and cerebellum, suggesting more widespread disruption of amygdala networks in adolescent GAD than observed previously in task-based studies. We discuss these findings in terms of specific cognitive processes likely involved in
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The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NIMH or the National Institutes of Health.
The project described was supported by NIMH Career Development Award K23 MH074821 (A.K.R.).
Supplemental material cited in this article is available online.
The authors thank the participants and their families as well as Rachel Chizkov, B.A., of the New York University Child Study Center for her assistance in assembling the necessary datasets.
Disclosure: Drs. Roy, Fudge, Kelly, Benson, Castellanos, Milham, Pine, and Ernst, and Mr. Perry, Ms. Daniele, and Ms. Carlisi report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.