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Anxiety and threat-related attentional biases in adolescents with fragile X syndrome.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a single-gene disorder highly associated with anxiety; however, measuring anxiety symptoms in FXS and other neurogenetic syndromes is challenged by common limitations in language, self-awareness and cognitive skills required for many traditional assessment tasks. Prior studies have documented group-level differences in threat-related attentional biases, assessed via eye tracking, in FXS and non-FXS groups. The present study built on this work to test whether attentional biases correspond to clinical features of anxiety among adolescents and young adults with FXS. METHODS:Participants included 21 male adolescents with FXS ages 15-20 years who completed an adapted eye-tracking task that measured attentional bias towards fearful faces of varied emotional intensity. RESULTS:Among participants without anxiety disorders, attentional bias towards fear increased across age, similar to non-FXS paediatric anxiety samples. In contrast, participants with anxiety disorders exhibited greater stability in fear-related attentional biases across age. Across analyses, subtle fear stimuli were more sensitive to within-group anxiety variability than full-intensity stimuli. CONCLUSIONS:Our results provide novel evidence that although threat-related attentional biases may correspond with anxiety outcomes in FXS, these associations are complex and vary across developmental and task factors. Future studies are needed to characterise these associations in more robust longitudinal samples, informing whether and how eye-tracking tasks might be optimised to reliably predict and track anxiety in FXS.

SUBMITTER: Kelleher BL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7087430 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Although the broad role of fear and hypervigilance in conditions of the gut-brain axis like irritable bowel syndrome is supported by converging evidence, the underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Even in healthy individuals, it remains unclear how pain-related fear may contribute to pain-related attentional biases for acute visceral pain. Building on our classical fear conditioning work in a clinically relevant model of visceral pain, we herein elucidated pain-related attentional biases shaped by associative learning in healthy women and men, aiming to elucidate possible sex differences and the role of psychological traits. To this end, we compared the impact of differentially conditioned pain-predictive cues on attentional biases in healthy women and men. Sixty-four volunteers accomplished a visual dot-probe task and subsequently underwent pain-related fear conditioning where one visual cue (CS+) was contingently paired with a painful rectal distention (US) while another cue remained unpaired (CS-). During the following test phase, the dot-probe task was repeated to investigate changes in attentional biases in response to differentially valenced cues. While pain-related learning was comparable between groups, men revealed more pronounced attentional engagement with the CS+ and CS- whereas women demonstrated stronger difficulties to disengage from the CS+ when presented with a neutral cue. However, when both CS+ and CS- were presented together, women revealed stronger difficulties to disengage from the CS-. Regression analyses revealed an interaction of sex, with negative affect predicting stronger avoidance of the CS+ and stronger difficulties to disengage attention from the CS- in men. These results provide first evidence that pain-related fear conditioning may induce attentional biases differentially in healthy women and men. Hence, sex differences may play a role in attentional mechanisms underlying hypervigilance, and may be modulated by psychological vulnerability factors relevant to chronic visceral pain.

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Anxiety and threat-related attentional biases in adolescents with fragile X syndrome.

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