Reduced Sensitivity to Non-Fear-Related Stimulus Changes in Panic Disorder

Abstract

Panic disorder (PD) is associated with increased body vigilance and reduced cognitive resources directed at non-fear-related stimuli, particularly in the absence of stimulus-rich environments. To date, only few studies have investigated whether this deficit in PD is reflected in reduced mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related potential indexing preattentive sensitivity to unexpected stimulus changes. We tested 35 patients affected by PD and 42 matched healthy controls in an oddball paradigm, using frequency and duration deviant stimuli to measure auditory MMN. PD patients displayed reduced duration MMN amplitudes in comparison to healthy controls. No group differences were detected for duration MMN latency, as well as frequency MMN indices. Results support the notion of reduced processing of non-fear-related stimuli in PD patients, particularly with regard to the preattentive processing of sound duration deviants. Additionally, our findings are in line with clinical studies reporting divergent deficits in preattentive processing of frequency and duration deviants.

Anxiety attenuates learning advantages conferred by statistical stability and induces loss of volatility-attuning in brain activity

“…Similar findings were observed in people scoring high in trait anxiety (Chen et al, 2017) and among neurotypical individuals under threat-of-shock (Scaife et al, 2006;Cornwell et al, 2007Cornwell et al, , 2017. Despite being at odds with the hypersensitivity hypotheses, these findings are consistent with multiple other EEG studies, which show a pattern of reduced surprise responses in anxiety disorders, or 'threat-induced attenuation', including case-control studies in PTSD (McFarlane et al, 1993;Menning et al, 2008) and panic disorder (Tang et al, 2013;Rentzsch et al, 2019). We highlight a number of potential factors contributing to this below.…”

P50, N100, and P200 Sensory Gating in Panic Disorder

“…Abnormal sensory information processing in PD has been evidenced by various ERPs such as mismatch negativity, 14 N100 11-13 and P300 potentials. 16 However, the present study adds to evidence for functional information processing indices such as normal N100 15,18 or normal N200 and P200.…”

“…This study is part of larger trial that investigated the effect of physical exercise on cognitive behavioral therapy and was already published elsewhere. 14,48 Here we report baseline sensory gating data. All study procedures were performed according to the declaration of Helsinki.…”

“…[11][12][13] Additionally, PD patients have been shown to display reduced mismatch negativity amplitudes, signaling a reduced sensitivity to external stimulus changes. 14 Further evidence in this condition includes elevated P300a and P300 amplitudes to rare stimuli reflecting changes in attentional processes, 15,16 as well as reduced P300 amplitudes in panic disorder with atypical symptoms 16 and increased error-related negativity. 17 Although it needs to be noted that ERP trials in PD revealed mixed results, 15,18 cumulative evidence tends to support the assumption of disturbed signal to noise detection in PD.…”

Hypo- and hyper- sensory processing heterogeneity in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…stop gain, stop loss, start loss, splice acceptor, splice donor or frameshift) or missense mutations with a CADD score ≥30 (MIS30). SNVs with a CADD PHRED-scaled score > 30 were at the top 0.01% across all potential ∼9 billion SNVs and were therefore considered as having a high likelihood to impact protein structure/function (Rentzsch et al, 2019). To control population structure, we performed a PCA analysis using PLINK 1.9 (Purcell et al, 2007), and we used the rst four components as covariables for all the burden analysis.…”