Biological Mechanisms of Anxiety Disorders: Animal and Human Studies

Abstract

Anxiety disorders are characterized by persistent and debilitating feelings of worry stemming from difficulty assessing threats and inhibiting fear responding. However, heterogeneity of symptom profiles across anxiety disorders, and even within the same diagnoses, have complicated treatment, as treatment success varies widely across patients. Improved mechanistic understanding of the disparate symptoms of anxiety disorders are needed to help inform the development of new treatments. There is a growing understanding that psychiatric disease, including anxiety disorders, results from perturbation of key brain regions and their complex local and regional circuitries. Increasing attention has also been given to the influence of specific genetic polymorphisms and their effects on circuit activity and behavior. This chapter highlights human neuroimaging and rodent studies that parallel one another and illustrate how an integrated approach has advanced understanding of neural circuits implicated in anxiety disorders.