Functional neural changes associated with psychotherapy in anxiety disorders - A meta-analysis of longitudinal fMRI studies.

Successful psychotherapy for anxiety disorders is thought to be linked to functional neural changes in prefrontal control areas and fear-related limbic regions. Thus, discovering such therapy-associated neural changes might point to relevant mechanisms of action. Using AES-SDM, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis of 22 whole-brain datasets (n = 419 anxiety patients) from 18 studies identified by our systematic literature search following PRISMA criteria (preregistration available at OSF: https://osf.