Abstract
Patients with panic disorder (PD) have a bias to respond to normal stimuli in a fearful way. This may be due to the preactivation of fear-associated networks prior to stimulus perception. Based on EEG, we investigated the difference between patients with PD and normal controls in resting state activity using features of transiently stable brain states (microstates). EEGs from 18 drug-naive patients and 18 healthy controls were analyzed. Microstate analysis showed that one class of microstates (with a right-anterior to left-posterior orientation of the mapped field) displayed longer durations and covered more of the total time in the patients than controls. Another microstate class (with a symmetric, anterior-posterior orientation) was observed less frequently in the patients compared to controls. The observation that selected microstate classes differ between patients with PD and controls suggests that specific brain functions are altered already during resting condition. The altered resting state may be the starting point of the observed dysfunctional processing of phobic stimuli.
Highlights
Panic disorder (PD) is a common mental disorder [1,2,3], which is thought to involve aberrant cognitive features such as catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations even during the inter-attack conditions [4]
This is consistent with the results from RSN studies using fMRI showing that specific aspects of brain resting networks are affected in patients with PD [25,26,27,28]
They reported an overall change of microstate lateralization with a more right-anterior to left-posterior orientation in patients with PD, which is consistent with our result of more percent total time in microstates of class A
Summary
Panic disorder (PD) is a common mental disorder [1,2,3], which is thought to involve aberrant cognitive features such as catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations even during the inter-attack conditions [4]. A number of neuroimaging studies have demonstrated aberrant brain activity in these cortical areas during panic attacks [10,11] and during resting [12,13,14,15,16,17]. Factor analyses of functional connectivity of spontaneous fMRI-BOLD signal fluctuations, which yields socalled resting-state networks [18,19,20,21,22,23,24] demonstrated aberrant RSNs in patient with anxiety disorders [25,26,27,28]
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