Pediatric Anxiety and Movie-Evoked Brain-Heart Communication

Anxiety states and symptoms can drive increases in heart rate through alteration in amygdala-prefrontal functioning. How such brain-heart communication mechanisms emerge across development and in naturalistic settings is unclear. In a pediatric sample with and without anxiety disorders, we calculated measures of brain-heart ‘coherence’ during an anxiety-inducing movie clip and at rest. Our primary analysis did not indicate anxiety-potentiated effects of coherence between heart rate and amygdala-prefrontal dynamic connectivity. However, exploratory analyses indicated that pediatric patients with anxiety disorders might exhibit relatively greater coherence between heart rate and sgACC activity. This provides preliminary evidence for a role of the sgACC in the development of somatic symptoms of anxiety.