Magnetic resonance imaging

Anxiety sensitivity

Fasciculus

Anxiety

Psychopathology

Audiology

Psychiatry

Developmental psychology

Uncinate fasciculus

Medicine

Fractional anisotropy

Inferior longitudinal fasciculus

Clinical psychology

Diffusion MRI

Psychology

Radiology

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Previous research suggests that exposure to early life stress (ELS) affects the structural integrity of the uncinate fasciculus (UF), a frontolimbic white matter tract that undergoes protracted development throughout adolescence. Adolescence is an important transitional period characterized by the emergence of internalizing psychopathology such as anxiety, particularly in individuals with high levels of stress sensitivity. We examined the relations among sensitivity to ELS, structural integrity of the UF, and anxiety symptoms in 104 early adolescents. We conducted structured interviews to assess exposure to ELS and obtained subjective and objective ratings of stress severity, from which we derived an index of ELS sensitivity. We also acquired diffusion MRI and conducted deterministic tractography to visualize UF trajectories and to compute measures of structural integrity from three distinct segments of the UF: frontal, insular, temporal. We found that higher sensitivity to ELS predicted both reduced fraction...

Effects of sensitivity to life stress on uncinate fasciculus segments in early adolescence