Tagged: Psychiatrists

Increasing evidence suggests that the clinical effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are target-dependent. Within any given symptom, precise targeting of specific brain circuits may improve clinical outcomes. This principle can also be extended across symptoms – stimulation of different circuits may lead to different symptom-level outcomes. This may include targeting different symptoms within the same disorder (such as dysphoria versus anxiety in patients with major depression) or targeting the same symptom across different disorders (such as primary major depression and depression secondary to stroke, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s disease).

Stress modulates the activity of various memory systems and can thereby guide behavioral interaction with the environment in an adaptive or maladaptive manner. At the cellular level, a large body of evidence indicates that (nor)adrenaline and glucocorticoid release induced by acute stress-exposure affects synapse function and synaptic plasticity, which are critical substrates for learning and memory. Recent evidence suggests that memories are supported in the brain by sparsely distributed neurons within networks, termed engram cell ensembles.

To gain insights into the role of brain structure and function on anxiety (ANX), we conducted a genetically informed investigation leveraging information from ANX genome-wide association studies available from UK Biobank (UKB; N=380,379), FinnGen Program (N=290,361), and Million Veteran Program (MVP; N=175,163) together with UKB genome-wide data (N=33,224) related to 3,935 brain imaging-derived phenotypes (IDP).