Journal
JOURNAL OF TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE
Volume 19, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
BMC
DOI: 10.1186/s12967-021-02968-2
Keywords
Panic disorder; Emotion regulation; Implicit cognitive reappraisal; fMRI; Prefrontal cortex
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [81871080, 81401486]
- Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province of China [20170540276, 2019-MS-099]
- Medicine and Health Science Technology Development Program of Shandong Province [202003070713]
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This study found differences in brain activity patterns during implicit cognitive reappraisal between PD patients and healthy controls, characterized by deficits in specific brain regions and related emotional dysregulation. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between implicit cognitive reappraisal processes and severity of anxiety and panic in PD patients.
BackgroundPanic disorder (PD) is thought to be related with deficits in emotion regulation, especially in cognitive reappraisal. According to the cognitive model, PD patients' intrinsic and unconscious misappraisal strategies are the cause of panic attacks. However, no studies have yet been performed to explore the underlying neuromechanism of cognitive reappraisal that occur on an unconscious level in PD patients.MethodsTwenty-six patients with PD and 25 healthy controls (HC) performed a fully-verified event-block design emotional regulation task aimed at investigating responses of implicit cognitive reappraisal during an fMRI scan. Participants passively viewed negatively valanced pictures that were beforehand neutrally, positively, or adversely portrayed in the task.ResultsWhole-brain analysis of fMRI data showed that PD patients exhibited less activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) compared to HC, but presented greater activation in parietal cortex when negative pictures were preceded by positive/neutral vs negative descriptions. Simultaneously, interactive effects of GroupxCondition were observed in the right amygdala across both groups. Furthermore, activation in dlPFC and dmPFC was is negatively correlated to severity of anxiety and panic in PD when negative images were preceded by non-negative vs negative descriptions.ConclusionsEmotional dysregulation in PD is likely the result of deficient activation in dlPFC and dmPFC during implicit cognitive reappraisal, in line with impaired automatic top-down regulation. Correlations between severity of anxiety and panic attack and activation of right dlPFC and dmPFC suggest that the failure to engage prefrontal region during implicit cognitive reappraisal might be associated wtih the severity of anxiety and panic; such functional patterns might be the target of possible treatments.
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