Neural correlates of psychotherapy in anxiety and depression: A meta-analysis

Several studies have used neuroimaging methods to identify neural change in brain networks associated to emotion regulation after psychotherapy of depression and anxiety. In the present work we adopted a meta-analytic technique specific to neuroimaging data to evaluate the consistence of empirical findings and assess models of therapy that have been proposed in the literature. Meta-analyses were conducted with the Activation Likelihood Estimation technique, which evaluates the overlap between foci of activation across studies. The analysis included 16 studies found in Pubmed (200 foci of activation and 193 patients). Separate meta-analyses were conducted on studies of 1) depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder investigated with rest state metabolism (6 studies, 70 patients); 2) depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder investigated with task-related activation studies (5 studies, 65 patients); 3) the previous studies considered jointly; and 4) ...