ArticleJournal of affective disorders2019
When worry may be good for you: Worry severity and limbic-prefrontal functional connectivity in late-life generalized anxiety disorder.
Article in Journal of affective disorders, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Identifying neurodevelopmental signatures of worry: An ultra-high field (7-Tesla) fMRI study among adolescents and young adults.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Older and wiser? The neural correlates of worry induction and reappraisal in older adults.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- The Desegregation of Neural Networks During Worry Induction in Late Life: An Effective Connectivity Analysis.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- A preliminary investigation of worry, cortical amyloid burden, and stressor-evoked brain and cardiovascular reactivity in older adults.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Article
- Specific Association of Worry With Amyloid-β But Not Tau in Cognitively Unimpaired Older Adults.The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry · 2024Article
- Manual segmentation of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and the dorsal and ventral bed nucleus of stria terminalis using multimodal 7 Tesla structural MRI: probabilistic atlases for a stress-control triad.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Heterogenous Subtypes of Late-Life Depression and Their Cognitive Patterns: A Latent Class Analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Childhood Threat Is Associated With Lower Resting-State Connectivity Within a Central Visceral Network.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Illness Severity Moderated Association Between Trait Anxiety and Amygdala-Based Functional Connectivity in Generalized Anxiety Disorder.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Adolescent anxiety disorders and the developing brain: comparing neuroimaging findings in adolescents and adults.General psychiatry · 2021Review
- Emotion processing in depression and anxiety disorders in older adults: systematic review.BJPsych open · 2020Article
- Threat bias and resting state functional connectivity of the amygdala and bed nucleus stria terminalis.Journal of psychiatric research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundLate-life generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is one of the most common anxiety disorders in older adults. However, its neural markers have received relatively little attention. In this study, we explored the association between worry severity and limbic-prefrontal connectivity during emotional reactivity in late-life GAD.
methodsWe recruited 16 anxious (GAD) and 20 non-anxious (HC) older adults to perform the faces/shapes emotional reactivity task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We investigated the functional connectivity of both the amygdala and the bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) with the prefrontal cortex (PFC) using generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) analysis. We tested for (1) group differences in connectivity, (2) association between worry severity and connectivity, and (3) interaction between group and worry severity and its association with connectivity.
resultsAmygdala-PFC and BNST-PFC functional connectivity were associated with worry severity in an inverse U-shape, and was independent of depression severity, global anxiety, neuroticism, and general cognitive function. LIMITATIONS: Our limitations include slightly skewed PSWQ distributions, lack of non-anxious individuals with high worry, small sample size, and low depression comorbidity in a sample of late-life GAD that may not generalize to GAD in younger populations.
conclusionsThis suggests that moderate worry is associated with maximum engagement of the limbic-PFC connectivity, while severe worry is associated with failure of the limbic-PFC emotional regulation circuit. This may explain the aberrant and exaggerated responses to negative stimuli observed in participants with pathological worry.
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