Abnormal dynamic functional connectivity density in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

Chen, Yuyan; Cui, Qian; Xie, Ailing; Pang, Yajing; Sheng, Wei; Tang, Qin; Li, Di; Huang, Jing; He, Zongling; Wang, Yifeng; Chen, Huafu

doi:10.1016/j.jad.2019.09.084

Cited by 32 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…We conjecture that activation in the postcentral gyrus represent the therapeutic effects of the social anxiety-focused VR program. Further research is needed to investigate whether the therapeutic effect of our VR program could be extended to individuals with other clinical conditions that exhibit reduced postcentral gyrus activity, such as those with a generalized anxiety disorder [53] or a history of childhood abuse [54].…”

Section: Changes In Neural Responses To Positive Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Reality–Based Psychotherapy in Social Anxiety Disorder: fMRI Study Using a Self-Referential Task

Hur¹,

Shin²,

Jung³

et al. 2021

JMIR Ment Health

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Background Although it has been well demonstrated that the efficacy of virtual reality therapy for social anxiety disorder is comparable to that of traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, little is known about the effect of virtual reality on pathological self-referential processes in individuals with social anxiety disorder. Objective We aimed to determine changes in self-referential processing and their neural mechanisms following virtual reality treatment. Methods We recruited participants with and without a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder to undergo clinical assessments (Social Phobia Scale and Post-Event Rumination Scale) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Participants with social anxiety disorder received virtual reality–based exposure treatment for 6 sessions starting immediately after baseline testing. After the sixth session, participants with social anxiety disorder completed follow-up scans during which they were asked to judge whether a series of words (positive, negative, neutral) was relevant to them. Results Of 25 individuals with social anxiety disorder who participated in the study, 21 completed the sessions and follow-up; 22 control individuals also participated. There were no significant differences in age (P=.36), sex (P=.71), or handedness (P=.51) between the groups. Whole-brain analysis revealed that participants in the social anxiety disorder group had increased neural responses during positive self-referential processing in the medial temporal and frontal cortexes compared with those in the control group. Participants in the social anxiety disorder group also showed increased left insular activation and decreased right middle frontal gyrus activation during negative self-referential processing. After undergoing virtual reality–based therapy, overall symptoms of the participants with social anxiety disorder were reduced, and these participants exhibited greater activity in a brain regions responsible for self-referential and autobiographical memory processes while viewing positive words during postintervention fMRI scans. Interestingly, the greater the blood oxygen level dependent changes related to positive self-referential processing, the lower the tendency to ruminate on the negative events and the lower the social anxiety following the virtual reality session. Compared with that at baseline, higher activation was also found within broad somatosensory areas in individuals with social anxiety disorder during negative self-referential processing following virtual reality therapy. Conclusions These fMRI findings might reflect the enhanced physiological and cognitive processing in individuals with social anxiety disorder in response to self-referential information. They also provide neural evidence of the effect of virtual reality exposure therapy on social anxiety and self-derogation.

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Section: Changes In Neural Responses To Positive Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Reality–Based Psychotherapy in Social Anxiety Disorder: fMRI Study Using a Self-Referential Task

Hur¹,

Shin²,

Jung³

et al. 2021

JMIR Ment Health

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“…The reason for selecting a window length of 35 TRs is because the sliding-windows correlation analysis with a short window length could induce artificial fluctuations in estimating dFC (Lindquist et al, 2014;Hindriks et al, 2016;Liegeois et al, 2017). Hence, we selected the window length of about 100 s, which was suggested by previous studies (Liu et al, 2018;Pang et al, 2018;Li et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2020). According to the above analysis, we obtained 136 subseries in the sliding windows for each subject.…”

Section: Sliding-windows Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Language Network in Early and Late Cantonese–Mandarin Bilinguals

Liu

Chen

et al. 2020

Front. Psychol.

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The brain representation of language in bilinguals is sculptured by several factors, such as age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency level (PL) in second language. Although the effect of AoA-L2 on brain function and structure has been studied, little attention is devoted to dynamic properties of the language network and their differences between early and late bilinguals. In this study, we acquired resting-state fMRI data from early and late Cantonese (L1)-Mandarin (L2) bilinguals with high PLs of verbal fluency in both languages. We then analyzed dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) by using the sliding-windows approach, estimated the dFC states by using the k-means clustering algorithm, and calculated the dynamic topological properties of the language network for the early and late bilinguals. We detected four dFC states, State 1, State 2, State 3, and State 4, which may be related to phonetic processing, semantic processing, language control, and syntactic processing, respectively. Compared to the late bilinguals, the early bilinguals showed higher dFC between the inferior frontal area and the temporal area in State 1 and State 2, while higher dFC between the cerebellum and other regions in State 3. The early bilinguals showed a higher clustering coefficient and local and global efficiency in State 1 and State 3, but lower characteristic path length in State 1, than the late bilinguals. Together, these results suggested that AoA-L2 affects temporal neural activation and dynamic topological properties of the language network. These findings provide new information to understand the effect of experience of L2 acquisition on language network in bilinguals.

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“…Cognitive models underline the discriminatory processing of interior and exterior threat signals that SAD individuals engage in when confronted with others (e.g., negative beliefs, attentional prejudice to disinclination faces [2] as an indicator of the expansion and preservation of the SAD [3], [4]. Accumulating evidence from experiment-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in recent years, including aversive biomarkers, revealed such biases in the findings of fronto-limbic disruptions, resulting in limbic/paralimbic neural alterations in the emotional processing system (e.g., hippocampus, amygdala, and insula) and deviant activity (greater or smaller activations) in the neuronal areas that controlled emotional responses (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; dPFC) [5] and altered activity in the prefrontal cortex [6].Moreover, the right insula have positive causal effects on the dPFC, which would provide a significant and new platform for investigating the pathological anomalies in SAD [7], [8]. A previous systematic review of SAD indicated that adolescents and children with SAD exhibit emotional dysregulation in different domains of the emotion regulation system, such as enhanced social avoidance, more safety behaviors, recurrent negative thinking, biased perception and awareness of social information, and deficiencies in emotional expression [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, it seems reasonable that precuneus activity influences the neurocorrelates of cortical and subcortical connections involved in the production of highly sophisticated information processing rather than direct external stimuli processing [25]. Neurobiological models of SAD suggest that disturbances in the elaboration of the amygdala-prefrontal network and hippocampus are stronger in SAD individuals [7], [26].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Default Mode Network in Social Anxiety Disorder: EEG Resting-State Effective Connectivity Study

Al-Ezzi¹,

Kamel²,

Faye³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Several neuroimaging findings by using different modalities (e.g., fMRI and PET) have suggested that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is correlated with alterations in regional or network-level brain function. However, these modalities do not quantify the fast dynamic connectivity of causal information networks due to their poor temporal resolution. In this study, SAD-related changes in brain connections within the default mode network (DMN) was investigated using Electroencephalogram (EEG). Partial directed coherence (PDC) was used to assess the causal influences of DMN regions on each other and indicate the changes in the DMN effective network related to SAD severity. The EEG data were collected from 88 subjects (control, mild, moderate, severe) and used to estimate the effective connectivity between DMN regions at different frequency bands. Among the healthy control (HC) and the three considered levels of severity of SAD, the results indicated a higher level of causal interactions for the mild and moderate SAD groups than for the severe and HC groups. Between the control and the severe SAD groups, the results indicated a higher level of causal connections for the control throughout all the DMN regions. We found significant increases in the mean PDC in the delta and alpha bands between the SAD groups. Among the DMN regions, the precuneus exhibited a higher level of causal influence than other regions. Therefore, it was suggested to be a major source hub that contributes to the mental exploration and emotional content of SAD. In contrast to the severe group, the HC exhibited higher resting-state connectivity at the mesial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), providing evidence for mPFC dysfunction in the severe SAD group. Furthermore, the total Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) was positively correlated with the mean values of the PDC of the severe SAD group and negatively correlated with those of the HC group. The reported results may facilitate greater comprehension of the underlying potential SAD neural biomarkers and can be used to characterize possible targets for further medication.

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Abnormal dynamic functional connectivity density in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

Cited by 32 publications

References 89 publications

Virtual Reality–Based Psychotherapy in Social Anxiety Disorder: fMRI Study Using a Self-Referential Task

Virtual Reality–Based Psychotherapy in Social Anxiety Disorder: fMRI Study Using a Self-Referential Task

Dynamic Language Network in Early and Late Cantonese–Mandarin Bilinguals

Analysis of Default Mode Network in Social Anxiety Disorder: EEG Resting-State Effective Connectivity Study

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