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. 2024 Mar 29;24(1):241.
doi: 10.1186/s12888-024-05698-z.

Temporal network of experience sampling methodology identifies sleep disturbance as a central symptom in generalized anxiety disorder

Jiaxi Peng #  1 , Shuai Yuan #  2 , Zihan Wei #  3 , Chang Liu  4 , Kuiliang Li  5 , Xinyi Wei  6 , Shangqing Yuan  7 , Zhihua Guo  8 , Lin Wu  8 , Tingwei Feng  8 , Yu Zhou  9   10 , Jiayi Li  9   10 , Qun Yang  8 , Xufeng Liu  8 , Shengjun Wu  11 , Lei Ren  12   13
Affiliations

Temporal network of experience sampling methodology identifies sleep disturbance as a central symptom in generalized anxiety disorder

Jiaxi Peng et al. BMC Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Background: A temporal network of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms could provide valuable understanding of the occurrence and maintenance of GAD. We aim to obtain an exploratory conceptualization of temporal GAD network and identify the central symptom.

Methods: A sample of participants (n = 115) with elevated GAD-7 scores (Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-Item Questionnaire [GAD-7] ≥ 10) participated in an online daily diary study in which they reported their GAD symptoms based on DSM-5 diagnostic criteria (eight symptoms in total) for 50 consecutive days. We used a multilevel VAR model to obtain the temporal network.

Results: In temporal network, a lot of lagged relationships exist among GAD symptoms and these lagged relationships are all positive. All symptoms have autocorrelations and there are also some interesting feedback loops in temporal network. Sleep disturbance has the highest Out-strength centrality.

Conclusions: This study indicates how GAD symptoms interact with each other and strengthen themselves over time, and particularly highlights the relationships between sleep disturbance and other GAD symptoms. Sleep disturbance may play an important role in the dynamic development and maintenance process of GAD. The present study may develop the knowledge of the theoretical model, diagnosis, prevention and intervention of GAD from a temporal symptoms network perspective.

Keywords: Experience sampling methodology; Generalized anxiety disorder; Multilevel vector autoregression; Network analysis; Sleep disturbance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Temporal networks of generalized anxiety disorder symptoms. Note Blue edges represent positive relationships between nodes, red edges represent negative relationships between nodes. Thicker edges between nodes represent stronger relationships. The numbers represent significant edge weights
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Strength centrality of generalized anxiety disorder symptoms within the temporal networks
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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