# ATTENTION AND RELATED FUNCTIONAL BRAIN NETWORKS IN PEDIATRIC ANXIETY DISORDERS

> **NIH NIH K23** · WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $177,822

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Anxiety disorders are the most common class of mental illness in children, affecting up to 30% of individuals
prior to their eighteenth birthday. Children who develop an anxiety disorder often experience significant family,
social, and academic impairments and are at increased risk for developing additional psychiatric disorders as
adults. Although successful treatment has been linked to benefits that extend into adulthood, many children
remain highly symptomatic even with the best available treatments. New early interventions are clearly needed
for this highly prevalent condition. The mission statement of the National Institute of Mental Health offers a
general approach to finding new treatments: “to understand mind, brain, and behavior, and thereby to reduce
the burden of mental illness through research.” Functional brain networks are collections of brain regions with
a common function. Understanding pathology at the level of functional brain networks holds enormous promise
for unlocking the development, etiology, and treatment of mental illnesses such as pediatric anxiety disorders.
With this framework in mind, the purpose of this Mentored Patient-Oriented Career Development Award (K23)
is to enable the candidate to develop a research program investigating alterations in functional brain networks
in childhood anxiety disorders. The applicant's long-term goal is to use functional brain networks to predict
longitudinal course, treatment response, and develop new treatments for pediatric anxiety disorders. To help
achieve this goal, the training plan in this application addresses the applicant's need for training in clinical
developmental psychopathology research. Training and mentorship are provided in: 1) clinical assessments of
children for research purposes, 2) understanding emotional and cognitive development, 3) pediatric
neuroimaging, 4) longitudinal study design and analysis, and 5) treatment development. The research plan for
this project is closely linked to the training plan and includes the assistance of a multidisciplinary team of
mentors and consultants. The research proposal tests the hypothesis that alterations in one particular
functional network, the ventral attention network (VAN), are associated the development of anxiety disorders.
General alterations in the VAN are proposed to result in anxiety by increasing the orientation of attention to
threatening stimuli. To test these hypotheses, children ages 8-12 years with and without anxiety disorders are
assessed twice, 24 months apart, using neuroimaging and behavioral methods in a prospective design. Data
from this study will be used to inform an application for a more definitive R01 project that maps developmental
relations between the ventral attention network and development of anxiety in young at-risk children before the
onset of anxiety disorders. Results from this application are expected to have immediate treatment
implications, by determining whether trea...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9970266
- **Project number:** 5K23MH109983-05
- **Recipient organization:** WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Chad Michael Sylvester
- **Activity code:** K23 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $177,822
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-07-01 → 2021-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9970266

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9970266, ATTENTION AND RELATED FUNCTIONAL BRAIN NETWORKS IN PEDIATRIC ANXIETY DISORDERS (5K23MH109983-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9970266. Licensed CC0.

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