Univ. researcher seeks proof of anxious tendencies at birth

On a college campus, it can seem like everybody has anxiety sometimes. But for those who really do have the medical condition, Nathan Fox is on a mission  to help.

Fox has been working at the university for years and received a grant in September from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue his longitudinal investigation into the early signs of anxiety in children that began in the early 1990s. His subjects, who he began to study when they were only 4 months old, are now high school graduates leaving home to live on their own for the first time.

Fox, the director of the Department of Human Development's Child Development Laboratory, said this newfound freedom will change their lives and provide psychologists an insight into how those with anxiety respond to a college environment.

"In college, there's drinking whenever you want to, people are interested in discovering substances that aren't particularly legal, people may be interacting sexually with other individuals, and these are things that may happen when you're living at home in high school, but are happening in a less rigid environment," Fox said.

Fox's research, which has received national acclaim, attempts to prove that some people are born with a natural tendency toward anxiety.

"We're researching the idea that children are born with a certain temperament and that some of the children who have that temperament go on to develop anxiety," Fox said. "Even among the ones that don't develop anxiety, they still have a temperament that makes them more vigilant, apprehensive and sometimes more fearful of certain ambiguous situations."

He and his colleagues believe that about 15 to 20 percent of the general population have a naturally anxious temperament.

"You can have the anxious disposition, but biology is not destiny," Fox said. "You can be born with the disposition, but that does not mean that you're going to have an anxiety disorder."

In order to study anxious behavior in his subjects early on, Fox took the infants to his laboratory on the fourth floor of the Benjamin Building and studied how they played in a room with their mothers.

"We were looking for which kids went off and explored the toys in the room and which kids just stayed with their moms," he said. "Over all these probes, or tests, we see which kids seem distressed and don't get off their mother's laps, and which kids are more exploratory and engaged in the situation that we've presented to them."

So far, Fox's findings indicate that, although some children are born with an anxious temperament, they can grow up to be adolescents who show no outward symptoms of anxiety.

"We've been finding that of these children who start out very fearful, about 50 percent of them end up being very nervous and socially fearful when they are in preschool and then school age," Fox said. "Some of those kids, not a large percentage, go onto develop anxiety."

Although not all of the children that displayed signs of an anxious temperament went on to develop the disorder, Fox's research proved they all had one common trait: a hyperactive amygdala.

Functional MRIs of test subjects showed the amygdala, a brain structure the size of their a thumbnail that determines the body's response to threats, increased in activity when unfamiliar situations were presented.

"We can put someone into this MRI machine, show them stimuli and see whether or not the amygdala of these temperamentally fearful children is more active than that of children who are not fearful."

Because subjects have to sit still for the duration of an MRI, Fox did not collect data on his subjects before they turned 15.

"By the time the kids were 15, we saw that, of the kids who we identified to have the anxious temperament, some of them were anxious and hyperactive, some of them were normal, but all of them had the hyperactive amygdala," Fox said.

Of the group at risk for developing anxiety, Fox hopes to discover what environmental factors contribute to people developing or not developing the disorder. 

For the next two years, Fox will be completing stress tests and functional MRIs on college-age students.

"If we can look back on how these children reacted when they were younger, then we can inform clinical psychologists of the risk factors for developing anxiety so that kids can be able to cope with their anxiety," Fox said.

hemmati at umdbk dot com