ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2022
A Voxel-Based Morphometric Study of Gray Matter in Specific Phobia.
Article in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
- Orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala as key regions for the classification of small animal phobia: A structural MRI machine learning study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Associations between sleep problems, cortical morphometry, and structural brain network organization in preschool children with autism: a retrospective observational study.European journal of pediatrics · 2025Observational
- The phobic brain: Morphometric features correctly classify individuals with small animal phobia.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The objective of this study was to analyze the neurostructural abnormalities of brain areas responsible for the acquisition and maintenance of fear in small animal phobia by comparing gray matter volume (GMV) in individuals with phobia and non-fearful controls. Structural magnetic resonance imaging was obtained from 62 adults (79% female) assigned to one of two groups: 31 were diagnosed with small animal phobia and 31 were non-fearful controls. To investigate structural alterations, a whole-brain voxel-based morphometry analysis was conducted to compare the GMV of the brain areas involved in fear between both groups. The results indicated that individuals with a small animal specific phobia showed smaller GMV in cortical regions, such as the orbitofrontal (OFC) and medial frontal cortex, and greater GMV in the putamen than non-fearful controls. These brain areas are responsible for avoidant behavior (putamen) and emotional regulation processes or inhibitory control (prefrontal cortex (PFC)), which might suggest a greater vulnerability of phobic individuals to acquiring non-adaptive conditioned responses and emotional dysregulation. The findings provide preliminary support for the involvement of structural deficits in OFC and medial frontal cortex in phobia, contributing to clarify the neurobiological substrates for phobias.
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