Waiting for spiders: Brain activation during anticipatory anxiety in spider phobics

Straube, Thomas; Mentzel, Hans‐Joachim; Miltner, Wolfgang H. R.

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.06.023

Cited by 260 publications

(269 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…There is also evidence to indicate that individuals with high levels of trait anxiety or spider phobia show increased activation in the VBF/BNST and insula in experimental conditions that involve monitoring for or anticipating Running Head: ANXIETY, SELECTIVE ATTENTION AND HYPERVIGILANCE threat (Somerville et al, 2010;Straube, Mentzel, & Miltner, 2007). These findings are consistent with theoretical frameworks proposing that anxiety is associated with hypervigilance for threat.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationssupporting

confidence: 80%

Exploring the function of selective attention and hypervigilance for threat in anxiety

Richards

Benson

Donnelly

et al. 2014

Clinical Psychology Review

165

111

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Section: Theoretical Implicationssupporting

confidence: 80%

Exploring the function of selective attention and hypervigilance for threat in anxiety

Richards

Benson

Donnelly

et al. 2014

Clinical Psychology Review

165

111

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…(2015) or Straube et al. (2007), we did not find reduced CBF in the insula and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis during anticipatory anxiety after successful psychotherapy. This may be due to our use of a pre‐ and posttreatment design within a patient group, as opposed to comparisons between patients and healthy control subjects, as used in the fMRI studies.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 65%

CBT reduces CBF: cognitive‐behavioral therapy reduces cerebral blood flow in fear‐relevant brain regions in spider phobia

et al. 2016

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BackgroundImaging studies have provided evidence that cognitive‐behavioral therapy (CBT) is able to change brain activation in phobic patients in response to threatening stimuli. The changes occurred in both emotion‐generating and modulatory regions. In this study, we use a data‐driven approach to explore resting state cerebral blood flow (CBF) measured by arterial spin labeling (ASL), before and after CBT.MethodsEight female patients with spider phobia were scanned before and 1 month after an exposure‐based group therapy for spider phobia. Each MRI session consisted of an ASL resting state measurement acquired before and after a symptom provocation task involving the showing of spider pictures in the scanner. The first ASL acquisition measured anticipatory anxiety and the second measured postprocessing of phobia‐relevant stimuli.ResultsCognitive‐behavioral therapy significantly reduced spider phobic symptoms in all patients. Symptom reduction during anticipatory anxiety was accompanied by reduced bilateral CBF in the parahippocampal gyrus, ventral anterior thalamus, Brodmann area 8, and the anterior cingulate cortex. During postprocessing of phobia‐relevant stimuli, patients showed reduced CBF in the bilateral insula, components of the motor cortex, and areas associated with language functions.ConclusionsLongitudinal CBF dynamics following CBT were in concordance with results from several studies using BOLD fMRI to investigate the effects of psychotherapy on brain activity. CBF can be quantified by ASL, with the principal advantage of sensitivity to slow variations in neural activity and task independence. Therefore, ASL may be a suitable method for monitoring and evaluating the efficacy of psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy approaches.

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“…[51][52][53] A series of functional imaging studies have implicated activity changes in the anterior cingulate cortex not only in fear but also in pathological anxiety states in humans such as phobic fear, PD, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder studies. [54][55][56][57] Given the fact that anxiety/fear-related brain circuits seem to be strongly conserved across species, these results could suggest that an altered expression of Tmem132d in the cingulate cortex may contribute to an altered activation profile of this brain region in the presence of anxiogenic stimuli and thus to a predisposition to pathological states of anxiety. In addition to differences in expression, an exonic Tmem132d SNP was found to co-segregate with anxiety-related behavior in an F2 panel independent of both depression-like behavior and locomotor activity (Figures 5c-f), thus suggesting an evolutionary conserved, causal involvement of this gene in anxiety-related phenomena.…”

Section: Tmem132d a New Candidate Gene For Panic Disordermentioning

confidence: 94%

TMEM132D, a new candidate for anxiety phenotypes: evidence from human and mouse studies

et al. 2010

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The lifetime prevalence of panic disorder (PD) is up to 4% worldwide and there is substantial evidence that genetic factors contribute to the development of PD. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TMEM132D, identified in a whole-genome association study (GWAS), were found to be associated with PD in three independent samples, with a two-SNP haplotype associated in each of three samples in the same direction, and with a P-value of 1.2eÀ7 in the combined sample (909 cases and 915 controls). Independent SNPs in this gene were also associated with the severity of anxiety symptoms in patients affected by PD or panic attacks as well as in patients suffering from unipolar depression. Risk genotypes for PD were associated with higher TMEM132D mRNA expression levels in the frontal cortex. In parallel, using a mouse model of extremes in trait anxiety, we could further show that anxiety-related behavior was positively correlated with Tmem132d mRNA expression in the anterior cingulate cortex, central to the processing of anxiety/fear-related stimuli, and that in this animal model a Tmem132d SNP is associated with anxiety-related behavior in an F2 panel. TMEM132D may thus be an important new candidate gene for PD as well as more generally for anxiety-related behavior.

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Waiting for spiders: Brain activation during anticipatory anxiety in spider phobics

Cited by 260 publications

References 71 publications

Exploring the function of selective attention and hypervigilance for threat in anxiety

Exploring the function of selective attention and hypervigilance for threat in anxiety

CBT reduces CBF: cognitive‐behavioral therapy reduces cerebral blood flow in fear‐relevant brain regions in spider phobia

TMEM132D, a new candidate for anxiety phenotypes: evidence from human and mouse studies

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