P24-T Correlation of BOLD response and functional connectivity of amygdala with trait anxiety scores

Abstract

Background Fear conditioning allows modeling mechanisms of emotional learning and better understanding the emotional impairment. Neuroimaging of fear learning and extinction shows an altered activation of prefrontal cortex in different stress and anxiety disorders. Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) of amygdala also demonstrates changes after stressful events. We aimed to test whether the brain activity in fear extinction and rsFC of amygdala would show a correlation with scores of anxiety questionnaires in participants without explicit complain about health issues. Material and methods Twenty-four healthy volunteers participated in 3 fMRI-scanning sessions: the first resting state before fear conditioning and fear extinction, followed by the second resting state session. All participants filled Spielberger State and Trait Anxiety Inventory. The anxiety scores were used in the general regression analysis of the event-related BOLD response to conditioned stimuli and amygdala rsFC (pFWE Results State and trait anxiety varied from low to relatively higher scores (33.7 ± 10.54 and 41.3 ± 11.74 correspondingly). The BOLD response during fear extinction showed a significant negative correlation with trait anxiety scores in bilateral middle frontal gyri. Trait anxiety scores correlated positively with rsFC of the right amygdala and the right medial frontal gyrus only in the first resting-state session. Conclusions Our results confirm that personal anxiety can influence the prefrontal cortex activity during fear extinction and also can be associated with rsFC between the amygdala and specific areas of prefrontal cortex even in healthy participants. This work was supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation (Grant No. 16-15-00300 ).