Regional Cerebral Blood Flow and Anxiety: A Correlation Study in Neurologically Normal Patients

Summary: Regional CBF (rCBF) was evaluated by the 133Xe inhalation method in 60 neurologically normal pa-tients (30 men and 30 women) and hemispheric and re-gional values were correlated with anxiety measurements collected by a self-rating questionnaire before and after the examination. Statistically significant negative corre-lations between rCBF and anxiety measures were found. rCBF reduction for high anxiety levels is in line with re-sults previously reported by others and could be related to lower performance levels for moderately high anxiety scores as those reported in the present population. This could perhaps be explained by rearrangement of flow from cortical zones to deeper areas of the brain, classi-cally known to be implicated in the control of emotions. However, these results should be interpreted cautiously, since they were obtained in patients and not in normal subjects.