Neurocognitive mechanisms of human anxiety: identifying and<br/>targeting disrupted function

Objective

Within a 12 month period, 20% of adults will meet criteria for one or more clinical anxiety disorders (ADs). These disorders are hugely disruptive, placing an emotional burden on individuals and their families. While both cognitive behavioural therapy and pharmacological treatment are widely viewed as effective strategies for managing ADs, systematic review of the literature reveals that only 30–45% of patients demonstrate a marked response to treatment (anxiety levels being reduced into the nonaffected range). In addition, a significant proportion of initial responders relapse after treatment is discontinued. There is hence a real and marked need to improve upon current approaches to AD treatment.
One possible avenue for improving response rates is through optimizing initial treatment selection. Specifically, it is possible that certain individuals might respond better to cognitive interventions while others might respond better to pharmacological treatment. Recently it has been suggested that there may be two or more distinct biological pathways disrupted in anxiety. If this is the case, then specification of these pathways may be an important step in predicting which individuals are likely to respond to which treatment. Few studies have focused upon this issue and, in particular, upon identifying neural markers that might predict response to cognitive (as opposed to pharmacological) intervention. The proposed research aims to address this. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that there are at least two mechanisms disrupted in ADs, one entailing amygdala hyper-responsivity to cues that signal threat, the other impoverished recruitment of frontal regions that support cognitive and emotional regulation.
Two series of functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments will be conducted. These will investigate differences in amygdala and frontal function during (a) attentional processing and (b) fear conditioning. Initial clinical experiments will investigate whether Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Specific Phobia involve differing degrees of disruption to frontal versus amygdala function during these tasks. This work will feed into training studies, the goal being to characterize AD patient subgroups that benefit from cognitive training.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

• engineering and technology medical engineering diagnostic imaging magnetic resonance imaging
• medical and health sciences clinical medicine psychiatry anxiety disorders

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• ERC-SG-LS5 - ERC Starting Grant - Neurosciences and neural disorders

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2010-StG_20091118
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

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ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

Beneficiaries (1)