Your amygdala — an area associated with fear, anxiety, and anger — needs to have clean lines of communication to other parts of the brain. This piece of research reveals more detail about mis-connections from the amygdala in people with a particular anxiety disorder. (If you have anxiety which is poorly controlled, and then you tend to overreact to “annoyances” as discussed in this article, it makes it more difficult to have healthy relationships.) This study looks to me like more support for rewiring your brain and getting the amygdala better connected to areas like the prefrontal cortex — which is what meditation has been shown to do, in research studies using some of the same technologies in this study.
From ScienceDaily.
Scrambled connections between the part of the brain that processes fear and emotion and other brain regions could be the hallmark of a common anxiety disorder, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The findings could help researchers identify biological differences between types of anxiety disorders as well as such disorders as depression.
The study, which will be published Dec. 7 in the Archives of General Psychiatry, examined the brains of people with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, a psychiatric condition in which patients spend their days in a haze of worry over everyday concerns. Researchers have known that the amygdala, a pair of almond-sized bundles of nerve fibers in the middle of the brain that help process emotion, memory and fear, are involved in anxiety disorders like GAD. But the Stanford study is the first to peer close enough to detect neural pathways going to and from subsections of this tiny brain region.
Such small-scale observations are important for understanding the brains of people with psychiatric disorders, said Duke University neuroscientist Kevin LaBar, PhD, who was not involved in the research. “If we want to distinguish GAD from other anxiety disorders, we might have to look at these subregions instead of the general signal from this area,” he said. “It’s methodologically really impressive.”
To get close enough to discern one region of the amygdala from another, Stanford psychiatry resident Amit Etkin, MD, PhD, and his colleagues focused on “regions of interest” defined by detailed anatomical studies of human brains. They recruited 16 people with GAD and 17 psychologically healthy participants and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood-flow fluctuations caused by changes in activity in different regions of the brain. Each person spent eight minutes in the fMRI scanner, letting their minds wander.
The researchers analyzed the resulting data to determine which areas were connected — that is, which regions were likely to activate in tandem. They first looked at one subregion, the basolateral amygdala, which sits at the base of the amygdala. In healthy participants, they found that the subregion was linked to the occipital lobe at the rear of the brain, the temporal lobes beneath the ears and the prefrontal cortex just behind the forehead. These regions are associated with visual and auditory processing, as well as with memory and high-level emotional and cognitive functions.
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Adapted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center.
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