Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with dysregulated neural, cortisol, and cardiac stress reactivity and recovery. This understanding is predominantly based on studies in adults applying emotional-cognitive and trauma-related stimuli inducing negative emotions or perceived threat. Despite large numbers of adolescents with PTSD, few studies are available on neurobiological stress reactivity in this population. Moreover, no previous studies investigated neural reactivity to social-evaluative stress. Objective: To investigate functional brain connectivity, cortisol and cardiac reactivity to acute social-evaluative stress, and additional cortisol measures in trauma-exposed adolescents with and without high PTSD symptoms. Method: A speech preparation task to induce acute social-evaluative stress elicited by anticipatory threat, was used in a subsample of the Amsterdam Born Child and their Development (ABCD) birth cohort, consisting of trauma-exposed adolescents with (n = 20) and without (n = 29) high PTSD symptoms. Psychophysiological interaction analyses were performed to assess group differences in functional connectivity of the hippocampus, mPFC and amygdala during social-evaluative stress and recovery, measured by fMRI. Additionally, perceived stress, heart rate and cortisol stress reactivity and recovery, cortisol awakening response and day curve were compared. Results: The stressor evoked significant changes in heart rate and perceived stress, but not cortisol. The PTSD symptom and control groups differed in functional connectivity between the hippocampus and cerebellum, middle and inferior frontal gyrus, and the mPFC and inferior frontal gyrus during social-evaluative stress versus baseline. Mostly, the same patterns were found during recovery versus baseline. We observed no significant group differences in amygdala connectivity, and cortisol and cardiac measures. Conclusions: Our findings suggest threat processing in response to social-evaluative stress is disrupted in adolescents with PTSD symptoms. Our findings are mainly but not entirely in line with findings in adults with PTSD, which denotes the importance to investigate adolescents with PTSD as a separate population. Desregulación de la conectividad cerebral funcional en respuesta a estrés socio-evaluativo agudo en adolescentes con síntomas de TEPTAntecedentes: El trastorno de estrés postraumático (TEPT) está asociado con la recuperación. Esta comprensión se basa predominantemente en estudios con adultos, que aplican estímulos emocional-cognitivos y relacionados con el trauma que inducen emociones negativas, o percepción de amenaza. A pesar del gran número de adolescentes con TEPT, hay pocos estudios disponibles sobre la reactividad neurobiológica al estrés en esta población. Además, ningún estudio previo ha investigado la reactividad neuronal al estrés socio-evaluativo. Objetivos: Investigar la conectividad cerebral funcional, el cortisol y la reactividad cardíaca al estrés socio-evaluativo, y medidas adicionales de cortisol ...

No abstract