Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and panic disorder (PD) are most common anxiety disorders with high lifetime prevalence while the pathophysiology and disease-specific alterations still remain largely unclear. Few studies have taken a whole-brain perspective in the functional connectivity (FC) analysis of these two disorders in resting state. It limits the ability to identify regionally and psychopathologically specific network abnormalities with their subsequent use as diagnostic marker and novel treatment strategy. The whole brain FC using a novel FC metric was compared, that is, scaled correlation, which they demonstrated to be a reliable FC statistics, but have higher statistical power in two-sample t-test of whole brain FC analysis. About 21 GAD and 18 PD patients were compared with 22 matched control subjects during resting-state, respectively. It was found that GAD patients demonstrated increased FC between hippocampus/parahippocampus and fusiform gyrus among the most significantly changed FC, while PD was mainly associated with greater FC between somatosensory cortex and thalamus. Besides such regional specificity, it was observed that psychopathological specificity in that the disrupted FC pattern in PD and GAD correlated with their respective symptom severity. The findings suggested that the increased FC between hippocampus/parahippocampus and fusiform gyrus in GAD were mainly associated with a fear generalization related neural circuit, while the greater FC between somatosensory cortex and thalamus in PD were more likely linked to interoceptive processing. Due to the observed regional and psychopathological specificity, their findings bear important clinical implications for the potential treatment strategy.

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The SIPS-RC, which is simple and easy to use, can perform in the same manner as the NAPLS-2 RC in the Chinese clinical population. Such a tool may be used by clinicians to counsel appropriately their patients about clinical monitor v. potential treatment options.

Chinese CHR identified primarily by a novel clinical screening approach had a 2-year transition rate comparable with those of specialised help-seeking samples world-wide. Early clinical intervention with this functionally deteriorating clinical population who are suffering from attenuated psychotic symptoms, is a next step in applying the CHR construct in China.

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Increased anxiety in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely noted. The purpose of this study was to test whether the prepandemic functional connectome predicted individual anxiety induced by the pandemic.

The amygdala and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) play important roles in “emotion dysregulation,” which has a profound impact on etiologic research of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The present study analyzed both eyes-open and eyes-closed resting state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) of 43 subjects (21 GAD patients with medicine free and 22 matched healthy controls). The amygdala and the DLPFC were defined as regions of interest (ROI) to analyze functional connectivity (FC) in GAD patients compared with healthy controls. The main findings revealed GAD patients had increased FC between the amygdala and the temporal pole compared to healthy controls, which was found in both eyes-open and eyes-closed rs-fMRI. And altered FC between the ROIs and brain regions that mainly belonged to the default mode network (DMN) were found. These findings suggest that the abnormal FC between the amygdala and the temporal pole may contribute to the pathophysiology of GAD, and provide insights into the current understanding of the emotion dysregulation of anxiety disorders.