title: The Inverse Relationship between the Microstructural Variability of Amygdala-Prefrontal Pathways and Trait Anxiety Is Moderated by Sex.
abstract: Anxiety impacts the quality of everyday life and may facilitate the development of affective disorders, possibly through concurrent alterations in neural circuitry. Findings from multimodal neuroimaging studies suggest that trait-anxious individuals may have a reduced capacity for efficient communication between the amygdala and the ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC). A diffusion-weighted imaging protocol with 61 directions was used to identify lateral and medial amygdala-vPFC white matter pathways. The structural integrity of both pathways was inversely correlated with self-reported levels of trait anxiety. When this mask from our first dataset was then applied to an independent validation dataset, both pathways again showed a consistent inverse relationship with trait anxiety. Importantly, a moderating effect of sex was found, demonstrating that the observed brain-anxiety relationship was stronger in females. These data reveal a potential neuroanatomical mediator of previously documented functional alterations in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity that is associated with trait anxiety, which might prove informative for future studies of psychopathology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA.
authors.forename: M Justin
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA.
authors.forename: Annemarie C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA.
authors.forename: Alison M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Mattek
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth CollegeHanover, NH, USA; Division of Epidemiology, The Ohio State University College of Public HealthColumbus, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Samantha J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Chavez
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA.
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA.
authors.forename: Amy L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Palmer
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Indiana University School of Medicine Indianapolis, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Yu-Chien
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA.
authors.forename: Paul J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Whalen
keywords: amygdala; anxiety; connectivity; ventral prefrontal cortex; white matter