Respiratory perception measured by cortical neural activations in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder

Abstract

There has been evidence for the effect of anxiety on the neural processing of respiratory sensation using the respiratory-related evoked potentials (RREP) elicited by inspiratory occlusions. This study tested the RREP elicited by inspiratory occlusions in a group of outpatients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and a group of healthy controls. We hypothesized that the RREP P3 peak would be modulated in the GAD patients. A RREP oddball paradigm of 150-ms inspiratory occlusion protocol was used in 15 GAD patients and 11 healthy adults with normal lung functions. The RREP was recorded with a 40-channel electroencephalography (EEG) system. A minimum of 100 occlusions was collected for data analysis. We found that the averaged P3 latency of the GAD patients was significantly longer than the P3 latency of the healthy controls. In addition, the GAD group showed significantly reduced P3 amplitudes compared to the control group. No group differences in latency and amplitudes were found for earlier RREP components. These results demonstrated that a delayed and reduced attention peak (P3) is present in patients with GAD. This suggests that GAD as a disease state modulates the higher order processing of respiratory perception.

Respiratory sensory gating measured by respiratory-related evoked potentials in generalized anxiety disorder

“…The RREP method was previously described in a few comparable studies ( Chan and Davenport, 2010b ; Chan et al, 2014 ). In the current study, the electroencephalography (EEG) was sampled from cortical sites C3 and C4 at 1 kHz with a 40-channel EEG system (NuAmps, Compumedics Neuroscan Inc., Charlotte, NC, USA), bandpass filtered from DC to 50 Hz and referenced to the bilateral mastoids.…”

Dyspnea catastrophizing and neural activations during the anticipation and perception of dyspnea

“…Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that negative affectivity might also impact the neural processing of respiratory sensations (Chan et al, 2015;Chan, von Leupoldt, Bradley, Lang, & Davenport, 2012;Chan, von Leupoldt, Liu, & Hsu, 2014;Chenivesse et al, 2014;von Leupoldt, Chan, Esser, & Davenport, 2013). It has been suggested that this impact is mediated by (para)limbic brain areas such as insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and amygdala (Davenport & Vovk, 2009;Evans, 2010;Herigstad, Hayen, Wiech, & Pattinson, 2011;Paulus, 2013;Scano et al, 2013;von Leupoldt et al, 2008;von Leupoldt & Dahme, 2005).…”

Being Anxious, Thinking Positively: The Effect of Emotional Context on Respiratory Sensory Gating

“…These cortical dipole recordings of cerebral neuronal activations during the processing of information from respiratory muscle afferents are identified with the short- and long-latency peaks of Nf, P1, N1, P2, and P3 (Chan and Davenport, 2010 ). The short-latency exogenous (i.e., being affected majorly by the external factors such as stimulus intensity and airway resistance) peaks of Nf and P1 were found related to respiratory stimulus discrimination (Knafelc and Davenport, 1999 ; Davenport et al, 2012 ), while the long-latency endogenous (i.e., being affected majorly by the internal factors such as focused attention and emotion) peaks of P2 and P3 were found related to the affective dimension of respiratory perception (von Leupoldt et al, 2010b ; Chan et al, 2014 ). The N1 peak is thought to reflect both exogenous and endogenous aspects as it was found affected by manipulating physiological factors (Chou and Davenport, 2007 ; Davenport et al, 2007 ), but also by manipulating psychological factors (Harver et al, 1995 ; Webster and Colrain, 2000 ).…”