Research ReportAmygdala Function and 5-HTT Gene Variants in Adolescent Anxiety and Major Depressive Disorder
Section snippets
Participants
Thirty-one unmedicated adolescents with a current anxiety disorder, or major depressive disorder (MDD), or both and 33 psychiatrically healthy adolescents were recruited through community health practitioners and advertisements (Table 1). Data from 6 patients and 18 healthy adolescents have been presented previously (7, 29). Patients with anxiety or MDD were combined based on evidence implicating 5-HTT allelic variants in risk for both (11). Excluding MDD-only patients showed no overall change
Behavioral Data
Ratings and RT data during “how afraid” are presented in Figure 3. Data for three healthy participants were not recorded. Significant Face Emotion [F(3,171) = 33.69, p < .001] and Diagnosis [F(1,57) = 4.99, p < .05] effects emerged on ratings. Angry faces received highest ratings (2.38), followed by fearful (2.00), neutral (1.56), and happy (1.24) faces. Patients gave higher ratings to face emotions (2.02) relative to control subjects (1.59). Similar Face-Emotion effects characterized RTs [F
Discussion
Effects of 5-HTT gene variants on amygdala responses to emotional faces were studied in healthy and anxious/depressed adolescents during internal fear evaluation. A significant Genotype-by-Diagnosis-by-Face-Emotion interaction emerged on right amygdala activity, reflecting three key findings. First, in healthy adolescents, stronger amygdala responses to fearful faces characterized S/LG carriers, relative to LALA individuals. Second, this was opposite in patients in whom LALA individuals
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2015, Psychiatry Research - NeuroimagingCitation Excerpt :For trials containing emotional faces, high-risk children relative to normal-risk children had increased activation of the anterior cingulate, insula, hippocampus, basal ganglia and several frontal and temporal regions. These findings are consistent with adult and pediatric fMRI studies that also report abnormalities of fronto-limbic circuitry in anxiety disorders (Birbaumer et al., 1998; Thomas et al., 2001; Stein et al., 2002; Straube et al., 2004; Monk et al., 2006, 2008a; Phan et al., 2006; McClure et al., 2007; Blair et al., 2008; Evans et al., 2008; Guyer et al., 2008; Beesdo et al., 2009; Lau et al., 2009; Ball et al., 2012; Blair et al., 2012). Our findings are also similar to previous fMRI studies of behaviorally inhibited children and youth that also found alterations in prefrontal and limbic brain regions (Hardee et al., 2013; Perez-Edgar et al., 2014; Roy et al., 2014).