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Brain Imaging Shows How Children Inherit Their Parents' Anxiety

posted by martyb on Thursday July 09 2015, @05:52AM   
from the sensitive-subject dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

A study in an extended family of monkeys provides important insights into how the risk of developing anxiety and depression is passed from parents to children.The study shows how an over-active brain circuit involving three brain areas inherited from generation to generation may set the stage for developing anxiety and depressive disorders.

[...] "Over-activity of these three brain regions are inherited brain alterations that are directly linked to the later life risk to develop anxiety and depression,'' says senior author Dr. Ned Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. "This is a big step in understanding the neural underpinnings of inherited anxiety and begins to give us more selective targets for treatment."

[...] Interestingly, the brain circuit that was genetically correlated with individual differences in early-life anxiety involved three survival-related brain regions. These regions were located in the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain; the amygdala, the limbic brain fear center; and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-level reasoning and is fully developed only in humans and their primate cousins.

More evidence for epigenetics. If trauma can be encoded on the genetic level and passed down to offspring, can shared trauma affect a population's DNA and in turn express itself in its group behaviors/culture?

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Original Submission

• Check what they actually did Check what they actually did (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:04AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:04AM (#206834)

  Did they even measure anxiety?

  Our group developed and validated a paradigm for studying the neural bases of primate AT [Anxious Temperament] that combines [18-F] deoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) imaging with behavioral and neuroendocrine responses to a potentially threatening human intruder making no eye contact (NEC) with the monkey. The NEC context is designed to elicit naturalistic adaptive defensive behaviors and captures the evolutionarily conserved tendency of high-AT individuals to inhibit behaviors that otherwise could attract the attention of potential predators. Because it measures brain metabolism over ∼30 min, FDG-PET imaging is ideally suited to examine the sustained neural responses that underlie trait-like measures, such as AT. Following FDG injection, the monkey is placed in the NEC context. As FDG is taken-up into metabolically active cells, the monkey behaves freely in the NEC context, revealing its anxious disposition. The post-NEC PET scan measures the integrated brain metabolism that occurred during exposure to the ethologically relevant NEC context.
  [...]
  Specifically, our composite measure of AT was operationalized as the mean of the monkey’s relative freezing levels, inhibition of coo vocalizations, and plasma cortisol concentration (15–18).
  [...]
  In the NEC`context of the human intruder paradigm a potentially threatening human intruder stands ~2.5 meters away and presents their profile to the monkey while making no`eye` contact (NEC) for 30 minutes (4, 8). In contrast to being alone or exposed to a human intruder staring at the monkey, the NEC context reliably elicits freezing behavior.

  So they exposed monkeys to a person who acted creepy by standing silently in the corner of the room for 30 minutes. Then took averages of freezing, cooing, and cortisol. Here's a list of regions correlated with AT (from table S1):

  Anterior temporal lobe & Orbitofrontal Cortex, Brainstem, Thalamus, Hypothalamus, Hippocampus, Extended Amygdala, Subgenual Cingulate, Parietal Cortex, Septum, Visual Cortex, Superior Temporal Cortex, Motor Cortex

  This is essentially the entire brain. Then they pick out three "that are directly linked to the later life risk to develop anxiety and depression".

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• Re:Check what they actually did (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:29AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:29AM (#206843)

  Further, as mentioned earlier regarding the "biological age" computation[1], this one consists of adding up various things:

  A composite measure of AT was computed as the combination of standardized freezing, reductions in cooing and cortisol measures. More specifically, freezing minus cooing plus cortisol all divided by three

  Then at the bottom of page 7 of the supplement we see that as they add them up the AT composite approaches normality, as we would expect for measuring random noise.

  [1] https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=8315&cid=206380#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

  Parent