Search

Although the neuroanatomy of transgender persons is slowly being charted, findings are presently discrepant. Moreover, the major body of work has focused on Western populations. One important factor is the issue of power and low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio in neuroimaging studies of rare study populations including endocrine or neurological patient groups. The present study focused on the structural neuroanatomy of a Non-Western (Iranian) sample of 40 transgender men (TM), 40 transgender women (TW), 30 cisgender men (CM), and 30 cisgender women (CW), while assessing whether the reliability of findings across structural anatomical measures including gray matter volume (GMV), cortical surface area (CSA), and cortical thickness (CTh) could be increased by using two back-to-back within-session structural MRI scans. Overall, findings in transgender persons were more consistent with sex assigned at birth in GMV and CSA, while no group differences emerged for CTh. Repeated measures analysis also indicated that having a second scan increased SNR in all regions of interest, most notably bilateral frontal poles, pre- and postcentral gyri and putamina. The results suggest that a simple time and cost-effective measure to improve SNR in rare clinical populations with low prevalence rates is a second anatomical scan when structural MRI is of interest.

Background: Pain is common and can be debilitating in childhood. Theoretical models propose that attention to pain plays a key role in pain outcomes, however, very little research has investigated this in youth. This study examined how anxiety-related variables and attention control interacted to predict children's attention to pain cues using eye-tracking methodology, and their pain tolerance on the cold pressor test (CPT). Methods: Children aged 8-17 years had their eye-gaze tracked whilst they viewed photographs of other children displaying painful facial expressions during the CPT, before completing the CPT themselves. Children also completed self-report measures of anxiety and attention control. Results: Findings indicated that anxiety and attention control did not impact children's initial fixations on pain or neutral faces, but did impact how long they dwelled on pain versus neutral faces. For children reporting low levels of attention control, higher anxiety was associated with less dwell time on pain faces as opposed to neutral faces, and the opposite pattern was observed for children with high attention control. Anxiety and attention control also interacted to predict pain outcomes. For children with low attention control, increasing anxiety was associated with anticipating more pain and tolerating pain for less time. Conclusions: This is the first study to examine children's attention to pain cues using eye-tracking technology in the context of a salient painful experience. Data suggest that attention control is an important moderator of anxiety on multiple outcomes relevant to young people's pain experiences. Significance: This study uses eye tracking to study attention to pain cues in children. Attention control is an important moderator of anxiety on attention bias to pain and tolerance of cold pressor pain in youth.

Mounting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research is characterising the neurobiological trajectories of healthy human brain development. In parallel, studies increasingly acknowledge the relevance of perturbations of these trajectories for adolescent and adult psychopathology. Although an influence of steroid hormones on mood and anxiety disorders has been demonstrated in adults, very little is known about how steroid hormones alter human brain development and contribute to adolescent psychopathology. This review focuses on recent evidence obtained from structural and functional MRI in children and adolescents with genetic endocrine disorders and with characteristic fluctuations in androgen or oestrogen levels (familial male precocious puberty, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, Klinefelter syndrome and Turner syndrome). It aims to highlight how neurobiological findings from these paediatric endocrine disorders can provide insight into the contribution of sex steroids with respect to the development of neurocircuitry involved in affective processing (amygdala, hippocampus) and cognitive control (prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, striatum). In addition, findings from these populations may also provide important information on aberrant psychological processes relevant for the clinical care and management of these populations. Finally, the findings are discussed within the context of current frameworks in animal models, such as the organisational-activational hypothesis or the aromatisation hypothesis. The review ends with a discussion of open questions for future enquiry with the goal of integrating translational models with current knowledge of endocrine disorders and developmental studies in healthy populations.

Background Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on orienting and inhibition, similar studies have yet to be conducted in youths.

Background: Anxiety disorders are characterized by elevated, sustained responses to threat, that manifest as threat attention biases. Recent evidence also suggests exaggerated responses to incentives. How these characteristics influence cognitive control is under debate and is the focus of the present study. Methods: Twenty-five healthy adolescents and 25 adolescents meeting DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for an anxiety disorder were compared on a task of response inhibition. Inhibitory control was assayed with an antisaccade task that included both incentive (monetary reward) and incidental emotion (facial expression) cues presented prior to the execution of inhibitory behavior. Results: Inhibitory control was enhanced following exposure to threat cues (fear faces) only in adolescent patients, and following exposure to positive cues (happy faces) only in healthy adolescents. Results also revealed a robust performance improvement associated with monetary incentives. This incentive effect did not differ by group. No interaction between incentives and emotional cues was detected. Conclusions: These findings suggest that biased processing of threat in anxious adolescents affects inhibitory control, perhaps by raising arousal prior to behavioral performance. The absence of normalization of performance in anxious adolescents following exposure to positive emotional cues is a novel finding and will require additional exploration. Future studies will need to more specifically examine how perturbations in positive emotion processes contribute to the symptomatology and the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders.