Increased dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is associated with anxiety in adolescent girls.

The pubertal period is a time of rapid increase in the incidence of anxiety disorders, and thus, pubertal hormones may play a role in the precipitation of anxious psychopathology. DHEA, a steroid hormone that surges in adolescence, has been previously linked to anxiety, although the direction of this effect has been mixed. Using a cross-sectional design in a sample of 286 adolescent girls, the present study examined associations between salivary DHEA concentrations and self-report and interview-based measures of anxiety while controlling for pubertal status, menarche status, assessment time of day, and other hormones including testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone. Increased salivary DHEA concentrations were associated with more self-reported anxiety symptoms, increased anxiety symptom counts based on clinical interview, and increased probability of an anxiety disorder. Out of all anxiety symptom domains examined, generalized anxiety disorder symptoms were the best predictor of salivary DHEA concentrations after controlling for pubertal development. Collectively, our findings suggest relevance for DHEA in the development of anxiety in the pubertal period, as well as a robust relationship between DHEA and emerging symptoms of pathological worry during adolescence. The present study underscores the importance of examining associations between DHEA concentrations and anxiety in longitudinal designs.

The development of the error-related negativity in large sample of adolescent females: Associations with anxiety symptoms.

Anxiety is the most common form of psychopathology and tends to begin early in the course of development. Given this, there is great interest in identifying developmental changes in neural systems that may delineate healthy versus anxious trajectories. A substantial amount of work has focused on the error-related negativity as a neural marker of anxiety. The ERN is a negative deflection in the event-related potential that occurs when individuals make mistakes and is increased in anxious individuals. A separate body of work has focused on normative developmental changes in the ERN - demonstrating an age-related increase in the ERN that occurs across childhood and adolescence. In the current study, we examine the ERN in relation to specific phenotypic expressions of anxiety during a core risk period in a sample of females (N = 220) ranging from 8 to 14 years old. Results from the current study suggest that error-related brain activity is related to both parent and child report of social anxiety symptoms, even when controlling for all other symptom scales. Additionally, mediation models suggest that the normative developmental increase observed in the ERN is partially mediated by increases in social anxiety symptoms. The current results are novel insofar as they identify a specific phenotypic expression of anxiety that underlies developmental increases in this neural biomarker.