Knight Lindsay K, Depue Brendan E
Interdisciplinary Program in Translational Neuroscience, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, United States.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, United States.
Front Psychiatry. 2019 Jul 17;10:510. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00510. eCollection 2019.
After decades of being overshadowed by the amygdala, new perspectives suggest that a tiny basal forebrain region known as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) may hold key insights into understanding and treating anxiety disorders. Converging research indicates that the amygdala and BNST play complementary but distinct functional roles during threat processing, with the BNST specializing in the detection of a potential threat to maintain hypervigilance and anxiety, while the amygdala responds to the perceived presence of an aversive stimulus (i.e., fear). Therefore, given that human anxiety is largely driven by future-oriented hypothetical threats that may never occur, studies involving the BNST stand at the forefront of essential future research with the potential to bring about profound insights for understanding and treating anxiety disorders. In this article, we present a narrative review on the BNST, summarizing its roles in anxiety and the stress response and highlighting the most recent advances in the clinical realm. Furthermore, we discuss oversights in the current state of anxiety research and identify avenues for future exploration.
在被杏仁核掩盖数十年之后，新的观点表明，一个称为终纹床核（BNST）的微小基底前脑区域可能为理解和治疗焦虑症提供关键见解。越来越多的研究表明，在威胁处理过程中，杏仁核和BNST发挥着互补但不同的功能作用，BNST专门负责检测潜在威胁以维持过度警觉和焦虑，而杏仁核则对察觉到的厌恶刺激（即恐惧）做出反应。因此，鉴于人类焦虑很大程度上是由可能永远不会发生的面向未来的假设性威胁驱动的，涉及BNST的研究处于未来重要研究的前沿，有可能为理解和治疗焦虑症带来深刻见解。在本文中，我们对BNST进行了叙述性综述，总结了它在焦虑和应激反应中的作用，并突出了临床领域的最新进展。此外，我们讨论了当前焦虑研究现状中的疏漏之处，并确定了未来探索的途径。
