ArticleeLife2024
Medial anterior prefrontal cortex stimulation downregulates implicit reactions to threats and prevents the return of fear.
Article in eLife, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exogenous estradiol modulates entorhinal cortex contributions to episodic encoding of conditioned threat in women.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2026Trial
- Neural mechanisms of fear memory precision and generalization: from auditory cortex to amygdala.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Polyunsaturated fatty-acids diet increases fear discrimination in rats and IGF-2 receptors signaling in the auditory cortex.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- An intracranial dissection of human escape circuits.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Subregions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate threat and protective information to meta-represent safety.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of aesthetic tragedy: evidence for enhanced semantic processing and cognitive control in response to tragic versus joyful music.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Examining anterior prefrontal cortex resting-state functional connectivity patterns associated with depressive symptoms in chronic moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury.Frontiers in neurology · 2025Article
- Overgeneralization of autonomic defensive reactions in obesity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Adaptive Safety Coding in the Prefrontal Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Downregulating emotional overreactions toward threats is fundamental for developing treatments for anxiety and post-traumatic disorders. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for top-down modulatory processes, and despite previous studies adopting repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over this region provided encouraging results in enhancing extinction, no studies have hitherto explored the effects of stimulating the medial anterior PFC (aPFC, encompassing the Brodmann area 10) on threat memory and generalization. Here we showed that rTMS over the aPFC applied before threat memory retrieval immediately decreases implicit reactions to learned and novel stimuli in humans. These effects enduringly persisted 1 week later in the absence of rTMS. No effects were detected on explicit recognition. Critically, rTMS over the aPFC resulted in a more pronounced reduction of defensive responses compared to rTMS targeting the dorsolateral PFC. These findings reveal a previously unexplored prefrontal region, the modulation of which can efficiently and durably inhibit implicit reactions to learned threats. This represents a significant advancement toward the long-term deactivation of exaggerated responses to threats.
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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.