By studying young monkeys, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe they have found the areas of the brain that cause childhood anxiety.
The study, which was published in the August 12 edition of Nature, could potentially help doctors develop new methods for detecting and treating kids at-risk for developing anxiety-related disorders, according to a press release published by the university on Wednesday.
Young primates who had increased activity in the amygdala and anterior hippocampus were more likely to demonstrate anxious behavior, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Psychology Chair Dr. Ned H. Kalin and his colleagues discovered. In previous research, Kalin discovered similarities between anxious young monkeys and their homosapien counterparts.
“We believe that young children who have higher activity in these brain regions are more likely to develop anxiety and depression as adolescents and adults, and are also more likely to develop drug and alcohol problems in an attempt to treat their distress,” Kalin said in the press release, which was posted to the university’s official website.
Kalin and his team analyzed 238 young rhesus monkeys and used PET scans to monitor their brain functions. They discovered that the monkeys that displayed anxious temperaments had higher recorded activity in the central nucleus of the amygdala and the anterior hippocampus, and that they could use brain activity readings to successfully predict each monkey’s level of anxiety.
“We’re really excited about the findings because we think that they have the potential to have a direct impact on how we understand these illnesses in children and hopefully we can come up with better ways to treat kids based on this information,” Kalin told Jon Lentz of Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
“Basically the idea and the hope would be we could intervene in a way that we could, more or less permanently, change a young child’s brain such that they would not have to struggle with these problems,” he added.
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