Attentional control abnormalities in posttraumatic stress disorder: Functional, behavioral, and structural...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Attentional disruptions are a hallmark of PTSD, yet neuroimaging findings are inconsistent.
• Few studies have used multi-modal imaging and emotionally-salient tasks to examine attention networks in PTSD.
• This study investigates attentional control in trauma-exposed women using fMRI and DTI.

Purpose of the Study:

• To comprehensively investigate attentional control abnormalities in a highly-traumatized civilian sample with PTSD.
• To examine the relationship between emotional stimuli, attentional performance, and brain function/structure.
• To identify neural correlates of attentional deficits in PTSD.

Main Methods:

• Recruited 48 traumatized women with and without PTSD for clinical assessments, fMRI, and DTI.
• Administered the Affective Stroop (AS) task during fMRI, featuring emotionally-salient distractors (trauma-relevant, positive, neutral).
• Utilized multi-modal neuroimaging (fMRI, DTI) to assess brain activity and white matter integrity.

Main Results:

• PTSD group showed poorer performance on positive AS distractor trials, even after controlling for trauma exposure.
• Lower activation in dorsal/rostral anterior cingulate cortex and greater insula activation in PTSD participants during difficult AS trials.
• Poorer AS performance correlated inversely with the structural integrity of the cingulum bundle and uncinate fasciculus.

Conclusions:

• Attentional control impairments in PTSD are pronounced with emotional cues.
• PTSD is associated with reduced cognitive control network activation and increased salience network activation.
• Impaired attentional control relates to functional and structural deficits in fronto-parietal and fronto-limbic networks.