The following is a summary of “Neural representations of anxiety in adolescents with anorexia nervosa: a multivariate approach,” published in the August 2023 issue of Psychiatry by Seiger et al.

Anxiety is a common symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN) and may contribute to the development and maintenance of the illness. Researchers performed a retrospective study to investigate neural responses to anxiety in adolescents with AN and non-clinical adolescents with mild anxiety who underwent fMRI sessions.

The study enrolled 25 adolescents with AN and 22 non-clinical adolescents with mild anxiety and scanned their brains while showing anxiety-provoking and neutral words. They used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to analyze the consistency of brain response patterns across trials.

Results demonstrated increased neural similarity for anxiety-inducing stimuli, mainly in prefrontal regions like the frontal pole and medial orbitofrontal cortex, with no significant group differences. Anxiety severity correlated with consistent brain responses within anxiety circuits and across cortical and subcortical areas, possibly indicating stronger conditioned brain responses to personal emotional stimuli in individuals with more severe anxiety symptoms. Anxiety from disorder-related cues could trigger learned neural reactions within and beyond traditional anxiety pathways.

The study suggested the potential role of persistent and automatic responses to environmental stimuli in contributing to AN maintenance. 

Source: nature.com/articles/s41398-023-02581-5