ArticleBiological psychology2018
Veterans with PTSD demonstrate amygdala hyperactivity while viewing threatening faces: A MEG study.
Article in Biological psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for post-traumatic stress disorder in adults.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2024Pooled it
- Cannabinoid modulation of corticolimbic activation to threat in trauma-exposed adults: a preliminary study.Psychopharmacology · 2020Trial
- Prelimbic cortex-associated stress sensitisation and region-specific mitochondrial adaptations across preclinical approaches relevant to PTSD and depression.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Facial expression processing is modulated by face gender and anxiety levels in developing youth.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Purinergic P2X7 receptor signaling in anxiety: Roles of stress-related neuroinflammatory mechanisms and therapeutic horizons.Purinergic signalling · 2026Review
- Threat Sensitivity, Stress, and Alcohol Use in Probable PTSD: Findings from a Mobile Attention Bias Modification Trial.Cognitive therapy and research · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal dynamics of multispectral oscillatory activity underlying the processing of negative and positive emotional images.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Sequential decreases in basolateral amygdala response to threat predict failure to recover from PTSD.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Stress Sensitization of Neurons in the Dentate Gyrus Is Dependent on Neuronal Interleukin-1 Receptor Signaling and Is Associated with Increased Synaptic Plasticity, Perineuronal Nets, and Excitatory/Inhibitory Input Imbalance.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Oscillatory brain dynamics underlying affective face processing.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics: Fear extinction mechanisms and amygdala modulation.Psychedelics · 2025Article
- Enhanced fear memory after social defeat in mice is dependent on interleukin-1 receptor signaling in glutamatergic neurons.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
- Examining the association between posttraumatic stress disorder and disruptions in cortical networks identified using data-driven methods.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
- How does it feel? An exploration of neurobiological and clinical correlates of alexithymia in trauma-exposed police-officers with and without PTSD.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Article
- The effects of trauma on feedback processing: an MEG study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Associations of mTBI and post-traumatic stress to amygdala structure and functional connectivity in military Service Members.Frontiers in neuroimaging · 2023Article
- Deep brain stimulation of the subgenual cingulum and uncinate fasciculus for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder.Science advances · 2022Article
- The neuroimmunology of social-stress-induced sensitization.Nature immunology · 2022Review
- Review
- Posttraumatic stress symptom severity is associated with impaired processing of emotional faces in a large international sample.Journal of traumatic stress · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a major psychiatric disorder that is prevalent in combat veterans. Previous neuroimaging studies have found elevated amygdala activity in PTSD in response to threatening stimuli, but previous work has lacked the temporal specificity to study fast bottom-up fear responses involving the amygdala. Forty-four combat veterans, 28 with PTSD and 16 without, completed psychological testing and then a face-processing task during magnetoencephalography (MEG). The resulting MEG data were pre-processed, transformed into the time-frequency domain, and then imaged using a beamforming approach. We found that veterans with PTSD exhibited significantly stronger oscillatory activity from 50 to 450 ms in the left amygdala compared to veterans without PTSD while processing threatening faces. This group difference was not present while viewing neutral faces. The current study shows that amygdala hyperactivity in response to threatening cues begins quickly in PTSD, which makes theoretical sense as an adaptive bottom-up fear response.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.