Cerebral White Matter Changes in Young Healthy Individuals With High Trait Anxiety: A Tract-Based Spatial Statistics Study

Abstract

Background: Abnormalities in prespecified and empirical white matter tracts in young patients with anxiety-related disorders have been reported in some diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies. However, with few literatures examining the association between the integrity of whole brain white matter and trait anxiety levels in the non-clinical populations, whether white matter changes arise in young healthy individuals with high trait anxiety remains unknown.Methods: We examined whole brain white matter alterations in young healthy individuals with high anxiety but without history of neurological or psychiatric disorders via DTI technology. Group comparison of tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) was performed to investigate the microstructural diffusion alterations in 38 high anxious subjects in comparison with 34 low anxious subjects matched with age, gender, and degree of education. These analyses controlled for depression to establish specificity to trait anxiety.Results: Young healthy subjects with high trait anxiety had significantly decreased fractional anisotropy (FA) values in multiple clusters, including corona radiate (CR), anterior thalamic radiation (ATR), inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), bilaterally, body, genu, and splenium of corpus callosum (CC) and forceps minor, compared with low trait anxious subjects. For the abnormal FA regions, the other diffusion metrics were also altered slightly.Conclusions: Non-clinical individuals with high anxiety already have white matter alterations in the thalamus-cortical circuit and some emotion-related areas that were widely reported in anxiety-related disorders. The altered white matter may be a vulnerability marker in individuals at high risk of clinical anxiety. These findings can deepen our understanding of the pathological mechanism of anxiety and further support the need for preventive interventions in high anxiety individuals.

White Matter Structural Brain Connectivity of Young Healthy Individuals With High Trait Anxiety

“…To our knowledge, the investigation on white matter structural connectivity in young healthy people with high trait anxiety is limited. Our group previously used tract-based spatial statistics method to detect the changes of white matter in young healthy populations with high trait anxiety (8). In this study, our results showed widespread abnormal connections in brain regions, but no significant difference in the network property was detected.…”

“…For the non-clinical population with high trait anxiety level, few neuroimaging studies have focused on brain connectivity. Our previous study used tract-based spatial statistics method to compare white matter differences among young healthy individuals with low and high trait anxiety levels (8). Alterations in the thalamus-cortical circuit and some emotion-related areas are commonly reported in anxiety-related disorders (8).…”

“…Our previous study used tract-based spatial statistics method to compare white matter differences among young healthy individuals with low and high trait anxiety levels (8). Alterations in the thalamus-cortical circuit and some emotion-related areas are commonly reported in anxiety-related disorders (8). In the present study, three weighted networks featured by fractional anisotropy (FA), fiber number (FN), and fiber length (FL) were analyzed; and group comparisons were performed using two-sample t-test to explore anatomical brain connectivity changes in a healthy population with high trait anxiety levels.…”

Clinical and neuroimaging correlates of cognition in HIV

“…It has previously been found that there is a high prevalence of clinical anxiety in people living with HIV (Janssen et al 2015; Brandt et al 2017), and that anxiety is associated with poorer performance on cognitive tests (Laverick et al 2017), similar to findings of increased anxiety in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (Chen et al 2018). It has also been noted that there may be white matter abnormalities on DTI in people with anxiety-related disorders in the absence of HIV (Lochner et al 2012; Lu et al 2018). Taken together, these findings suggest that there may be a role for screening and treating anxiety and depression in patients with HAND (Seedat 2012; Spies et al 2013; Wu and Li 2013; Sacktor et al 2018).…”

White Matter Plasticity in Anxiety: Disruption of Neural Network Synchronization During Threat-Safety Discrimination

“…However, the alteration of white matter microstructure involved in anxiety-related personality traits is not restricted to corticolimbic pathways. For example, harm avoidance in adult subjects was positively associated with radial and mean diffusivity, not only in the uncinate fasciculus but also in the anterior thalamic radiation, corpus callosum, parahippocampal cingulum, corticospinal tract, and inferior and superior longitudinal fasciculi (Westlye et al, 2011;Lu et al, 2018). Reduced FA was also detected in the medial and posterior portions of the corpus callosum of children with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Jackowski et al, 2008), and altered inter-hemispheric frontal, frontal-limbic, or frontal-temporal connectivity was identified as a potential marker of vulnerability to anxiety in young healthy subjects (Yang et al, 2019) and symptomatic anxiety in patients with late-life depression (Li et al, 2020).…”