Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: UMLS:C0851184 (thinning)
 11,252 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Structural deficiencies within the medial prefrontal cortex have been shown in anxiety-related psychiatric disorders such as panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. In healthy subjects, trait anxiety as the individual's disposition to experience anxiety-relevant feelings or thoughts has been shown to be a risk factor for psychiatric disorders. We aimed at exploring the structural correlates of trait anxiety in normal participants. We acquired high-resolution MRI scans from 34 subjects and used FreeSurfer to obtain a measure of cortical thickness. We correlated cortical thickness with self-rated trait anxiety in a whole brain analysis. Automatic subcortical segmentations of the FreeSurfer pipeline were used to relate nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and amygdala volume to trait anxiety. Trait anxiety was negatively correlated with cortical thickness in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and positively correlated with the bilateral volume of NAcc. Cortical thickness measures extracted from mOFC were negatively associated with the volume of left NAcc. Since, like in anxiety-related psychiatric disorders, in the healthy sample studied here, trait anxiety was associated with a reduction of cortical thickness in mOFC we suggest that this thinning is a structural precondition rather than a consequence of psychiatric illnesses.
 ...
PMID:Structural correlates of trait anxiety: reduced thickness in medial orbitofrontal cortex accompanied by volume increase in nucleus accumbens. 2170 88

Although anxiety and depression often co-occur and share some clinical features, it is still unclear if they are neurobiologically distinct or similar processes. In this study, we explored common and specific cortical morphology alterations in depression and anxiety disorders. Magnetic Resonance Imaging data were acquired from 13 Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), 11 Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), 11 Panic Disorder (PD) patients and 21 healthy controls (HC). Regional cortical thickness, surface area (SA), volume and gyrification were measured and compared among groups. We found left orbitofrontal thinning in all patient groups, as well as disease-specific alterations. MDD showed volume deficits in left precentral gyrus compared to all groups, volume and area deficits in right fusiform gyrus compared to GAD and HC. GAD showed lower SA than MDD and PD in right superior parietal cortex, higher gyrification than HC in right frontal gyrus. PD showed higher gyrification in left superior parietal cortex when compared to MDD and higher SA in left postcentral gyrus compared to all groups. Our results suggest that clinical phenotypic similarities between major depression and anxiety disorders might rely on common prefrontal alterations. Frontotemporal and parietal abnormalities may represent unique biological signatures of depression and anxiety.
 ...
PMID:Common and different neural markers in major depression and anxiety disorders: A pilot structural magnetic resonance imaging study. 3127 54

Network-based approach for psychological phenotypes assumes the dynamical interactions among the psychiatric symptoms, psychological characteristics, and neurocognitive performances arise, as they coexist, propagate, and inhibit other components within the network of mental phenomena. For differential types of dataset from which the phenotype network is to be estimated, a Gaussian graphical model, an Ising model, a directed acyclic graph, or an intraindividual covariance network could be used. Accordingly, these network-based approaches for anxiety-related psychological phenomena have been helpful in quantitative and pictorial understanding of qualitative dynamics among the diverse psychological phenomena as well as mind-environment interactions. Brain structural covariance refers to the correlative patterns of diverse brain morphological features among differential brain regions comprising the brain, as calculated per participant or across the participants. These covarying patterns of brain morphology partly overlap with longitudinal patterns of brain cortical maturation and also with propagating pattern of brain morphological changes such as cortical thinning and brain volume reduction in patients diagnosed with neurologic or psychiatric disorders along the trajectory of disease progression. Previous studies that used the brain structural covariance network could show neural correlates of specific anxiety disorder such as panic disorder and also elucidate the neural underpinning of anxiety symptom severity in diverse psychiatric and neurologic disorder patients.
 ...
PMID:Phenotype Network and Brain Structural Covariance Network of Anxiety. 3200 20