| Popis: |
Psychotherapy has been proven successful in treating anxiety disorders; however, a substantial percentage of patients does not benefit sufficiently from existing forms of therapy. One way to approach the problem of treatment non-response might be to forward our understanding of potentially treatment-related brain mechanisms. Existing studies in this field, however, vary a lot regarding method, quality, and results, making it hard to draw general conclusions. Therefore, we will conduct a coordinate-based meta-analysis using effect-size seed-based d mapping (ES-SDM) to identify consistent patterns of neuronal changes associated with psychotherapy in anxiety disorders, focusing on studies assessing fMRI before and after treatment. To gain a full picture of the current literature and fill in gaps of previous work, we not only include whole-brain results, but also aim to synthesize data regarding specific regions of interest. Results will be discussed in terms of therapy-related mechanisms of fear extinction learning that have been shown to be relevant for successful anxiety treatment. |
