Anxiety disease: decreased of functional connectivity in left superior temporal gyrus (GTs) and right GTs

Neuronal circuits involved in the pathophysiology of anxiety are not yet fully understood. We used functional connectivity MRI to explore the characteristic of functional connectivity in anxiety disorders patient and the neural mechanism of this disease. This work was selected as an oral presentation in 2006 ISMRM. Twenty right-handed subjects were included in this study, and were divided into two groups. The anxiety (P) group (n = 10; 7 male, mean age 42 years) consisted of patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for a principal diagnosis of anxiety disorder. The control (C) group consisted of volunteers free of psychiatric symptoms, and was matched on age and gender (n = 10; 7 male) with the panic patients. The subjects underwent noninvasive functional magnetic resonance imaging while listening actively to (1): emotionally neutral word alternating with no word as the control condition (CN, PN), and (2): threat-related words alternating with emotionally neutral word as the experimental condition (CT, PT). Each word