TY - JOUR TI - Threat of shock increases excitability and connectivity of the intraparietal sulcus AU - Balderston, Nicholas L AU - Hale, Elizabeth AU - Hsiung, Abigail AU - Torrisi, Salvatore AU - Holroyd, Tom AU - Carver, Frederick W AU - Coppola, Richard AU - Ernst, Monique AU - Grillon, Christian A2 - Brookes, Matthew J VL - 6 PY - 2017 DA - 2017/05/30 SP - e23608 C1 - eLife 2017;6:e23608 DO - 10.7554/eLife.23608 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23608 AB - Anxiety disorders affect approximately 1 in 5 (18%) Americans within a given 1 year period, placing a substantial burden on the national health care system. Therefore, there is a critical need to understand the neural mechanisms mediating anxiety symptoms. We used unbiased, multimodal, data-driven, whole-brain measures of neural activity (magnetoencephalography) and connectivity (fMRI) to identify the regions of the brain that contribute most prominently to sustained anxiety. We report that a single brain region, the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), shows both elevated neural activity and global brain connectivity during threat. The IPS plays a key role in attention orienting and may contribute to the hypervigilance that is a common symptom of pathological anxiety. Hyperactivation of this region during elevated state anxiety may account for the paradoxical facilitation of performance on tasks that require an external focus of attention, and impairment of performance on tasks that require an internal focus of attention. KW - anxiety KW - fMRI KW - magnetoencephalography KW - startle KW - alpha KW - global connectivity JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -