Functional MRI of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis during conditions of uncertainty in generalized anxiety disorder.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common psychiatric disorder characterized by constant worry or anxiety over every day life activities and events. The neurobiology of the disorder is thought to involve a wide cortical and subcortical network that includes but is not limited to the amygdala and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST). These two regions have been hypothesized to play different roles in stress and anxiety; the amygdala is thought to regulate responses to brief emotional stimuli while the BNST is thought to be involved in more chronic regulation of sustained anxiety.

Generalized anxiety modulates frontal and limbic activation in major depression.

Background: Anxiety is relatively common in depression and capable of modifying the severity and course of depression. Yet our understanding of how anxiety modulates frontal and limbic activation in depression is limited.

Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and two emotional information processing tasks to examine frontal and limbic activation in ten patients with major depression and comorbid with preceding generalized anxiety (MDD/GAD) and ten non-depressed controls.

A family-based association study of the glutamate transporter gene SLC1A1 in obsessive-compulsive disorder in 378 families.

SLC1A encodes the neuronal and epithelial glutamate transporter and was previously tested as a candidate for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) by several research groups. Recently, three independent research groups reported significant association findings between OCD and several genetic variants in SLC1A1. This study reports the results from a family-based association study, which examined the association between 13 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within or in proximity to the SLC1A1 gene.

Sapap3 and pathological grooming in humans: Results from the OCD collaborative genetics study.

SAP90/PSD95-associated protein (SAPAP) family proteins are post-synaptic density (PSD) components that interact with other proteins to form a key scaffolding complex at excitatory (glutamatergic) synapses. A recent study found that mice with a deletion of the Sapap3 gene groomed themselves excessively, exhibited increased anxiety-like behaviors, and had cortico-striatal synaptic defects, all of which were preventable with lentiviral-mediated expression of Sapap3 in the striatum; the behavioral abnormalities were also reversible with fluoxetine. In the current study, we sought to determine whether variation within the human Sapap3 gene was associated with grooming disorders (GDs: pathologic nail biting, pathologic skin picking, and/or trichotillomania) and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in 383 families thoroughly phenotyped for OCD genetic studies.

Sex-specific clinical correlates of hoarding in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Little is known about whether the clinical correlates of hoarding behavior are different in men and women with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In the current study, we evaluated the association of hoarding with categories of obsessions and compulsions, psychiatric disorders, personality dimensions, and other clinical characteristics separately in 151 men and 358 women with OCD who were examined during the OCD Collaborative Genetics Study. We found that, among men but not women, hoarding was associated with aggressive, sexual, and religious obsessions and checking compulsions.