A Neural Biomarker of Psychological Vulnerability to Future Life Stress

Abstract

Summary We all experience a host of common life stressors such as the death of a family member, medical illness, and financial uncertainty. While most of us are resilient to such stressors, continuing to function normally, for a subset of individuals, experiencing these stressors increases the likelihood of developing treatment-resistant, chronic psychological problems, including depression and anxiety. It is thus paramount to identify predictive markers of risk, particularly those reflecting fundamental biological processes that can be targets for intervention and prevention. Using data from a longitudinal study of 340 healthy young adults, we demonstrate that individual differences in threat-related amygdala reactivity predict psychological vulnerability to life stress occurring as much as 1 to 4 years later. These results highlight a readily assayed biomarker, threat-related amygdala reactivity, which predicts psychological vulnerability to commonly experienced stressors and represents a discrete target for intervention and prevention.

Neurobiological Interactions Between Stress and the Endocannabinoid System

“…Conversely, excitatory inputs from the mPFC and hippocampus dampen amygdala output (Hubner et al, 2014;Likhtik et al, 2005). Consistent with this, damage to either of these structures typically results in amplified responses to stress and impairments in termination of the stress response (McEwen, 2012b;Radley, 2012), and in humans, reduced functional connectivity of these circuits, or hyperactivity of the amygdala, results in increased anxiety and sensitivity to stress (Kim et al, 2011;Pruessner et al, 2010;Swartz et al, 2015). Given the demonstrated importance of these circuits in the regulation of the neurobehavioral effects of stress, this review will focus on the mechanisms and functional contributions endocannabinoid (eCB) signaling has within these circuits with respect to the regulation of various aspects of the stress response.…”

Clinical neuroprediction: Amygdala reactivity predicts depressive symptoms 2 years later

“…A few recent studies are beginning to suggest that amygdala reactivity to emotional facial expression is predictive of depression over time. For example, prediction has been found across a yearlong span in a community sample enriched for familial history of depression (Swartz et al, 2015) and in the presence of stressful life events (Swartz et al, 2014), as well as across an 8-month period in response to treatment, in a clinically depressed sample (Canli et al, 2005). Beyond these few studies; however, this literature has been largely cross-sectional, i.e.…”

“…Amygdala reactivity may underpin the disruption in mood, increased anxiety, biased emotional processing and preferential representation of negative information typical of depression (Price and Drevets, 2010). It has been a central focus in neural investigations of depression, with many studies showing increased amygdala reactivity to fearful facial expressions in those with diagnoses of depression (Groenewold et al, 2013;Hamilton et al, 2014) and in community samples examining depressive symptoms (Swartz et al, 2015). However, growing evidence suggests that individuals with depression may show amygdala hyper-activation to not just fearful and angry facial expressions, but also happy facial expressions (Yang et al, 2010).…”

Hjärnan formas av psykologisk behandling

“…Moreover, the dACC and the amygdala were more coupled in those who did not respond to the treatment. Amygdala responsivity to emotional faces has also shown to be a predictive marker of risk of future life stress (Swartz, Knodt, Radtke, & Hariri, 2015). Interestingly, neural response in the dACC has even been shown to predict subsequent rearrests among adult offenders (Aharoni et al, 2013).…”