Biological psychiatry
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Biological psychiatry · Jun 2014
Re-establishment of anxiety in stress-sensitized mice is caused by monocyte trafficking from the spleen to the brain.
Persistent anxiety-like symptoms may have an inflammatory-related pathophysiology. Our previous work using repeated social defeat (RSD) in mice showed that recruitment of peripheral myeloid cells to the brain is required for the development of anxiety. Here, we aimed to determine if 1) RSD promotes prolonged anxiety through redistribution of myeloid cells and 2) prior exposure to RSD sensitizes the neuroimmune axis to secondary subthreshold stress. ⋯ These data indicate that monocyte trafficking from the spleen to the brain contributes re-establishment of anxiety in stress-sensitized mice. These findings show that neuroinflammatory mechanisms promote mood disturbances following stress-sensitization and outline novel neuroimmune interactions that underlie recurring anxiety disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder.
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Biological psychiatry · Jun 2014
Generalized anxiety disorder is associated with overgeneralization of classically conditioned fear.
Meta-analytic results of fear-conditioning studies in the anxiety disorders implicate generalization of conditioned fear to stimuli resembling the conditioned danger cue as one of the more robust conditioning markers of anxiety pathology. Due to the absence of conditioning studies assessing generalization in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), results of this meta-analysis do not reveal whether such generalization abnormalities also apply to GAD. The current study fills this gap by behaviorally and psychophysiologically assessing levels of conditioned fear generalization across adults with and without GAD. ⋯ Overgeneralization of conditioned fear to safe encounters resembling feared situations may contribute importantly to the psychopathology of GAD by proliferating anxiety cues in the individual's environment that are then capable of evoking and maintaining anxiety and worry associated with GAD.