AUTHOR=Kim M. Justin , Brown Annemarie C. , Mattek Alison M. , Chavez Samantha J. , Taylor James M. , Palmer Amy L. , Wu Yu-Chien , Whalen Paul J. TITLE=The Inverse Relationship between the Microstructural Variability of Amygdala-Prefrontal Pathways and Trait Anxiety Is Moderated by Sex JOURNAL=Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience VOLUME=10 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00093 DOI=10.3389/fnsys.2016.00093 ISSN=1662-5137 ABSTRACT=

Anxiety impacts the quality of everyday life and may facilitate the development of affective disorders, possibly through concurrent alterations in neural circuitry. Findings from multimodal neuroimaging studies suggest that trait-anxious individuals may have a reduced capacity for efficient communication between the amygdala and the ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC). A diffusion-weighted imaging protocol with 61 directions was used to identify lateral and medial amygdala-vPFC white matter pathways. The structural integrity of both pathways was inversely correlated with self-reported levels of trait anxiety. When this mask from our first dataset was then applied to an independent validation dataset, both pathways again showed a consistent inverse relationship with trait anxiety. Importantly, a moderating effect of sex was found, demonstrating that the observed brain-anxiety relationship was stronger in females. These data reveal a potential neuroanatomical mediator of previously documented functional alterations in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity that is associated with trait anxiety, which might prove informative for future studies of psychopathology.