The Inverse Relationship between the Microstructural Variability of Amygdala-Prefrontal Pathways and Trait Anxiety Is Moderated by Sex.

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,

SUBMITTER: Kim MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5110520 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature