Citation

Badura-Brack A, McDermott TJ, Heinrichs-Graham E, Ryan TJ, Khanna MM, Pine DS, Bar-Haim Y, Wilson TW. Biol. Psychol. 2018; 132: 228-232.

Affiliation

Center for Magnetoencephalography (MEG), University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), Omaha, NE, USA; Department of Neurological Sciences, UNMC, Omaha, NE, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.01.005

PMID

29309826

Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a major psychiatric disorder that is prevalent in combat veterans. Previous neuroimaging studies have found elevated amygdala activity in PTSD in response to threatening stimuli, but previous work has lacked the temporal specificity to study fast bottom-up fear responses involving the amygdala. Forty-four combat veterans, 28 with PTSD and 16 without, completed psychological testing and then a face-processing task during magnetoencephalography (MEG). The resulting MEG data were pre-processed, transformed into the time-frequency domain, and then imaged using a beamforming approach. We found that veterans with PTSD exhibited significantly stronger oscillatory activity from 50-450 ms in the left amygdala compared to veterans without PTSD while processing threatening faces. This group difference was not present while viewing neutral faces. The current study shows that amygdala hyperactivity in response to threatening cues begins quickly in PTSD, which makes theoretical sense as an adaptive bottom-up fear response.

Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Language: en

Keywords

bottom-up; fear; magnetoencephalography; military; oscillatory activity; posttraumatic stress