Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) is a well-established first-line intervention for anxiety-related disorders, including specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder/agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Several neural predictors of CBT outcome for anxiety-related disorders have been proposed, but previous results are inconsistent.

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies investigating whole-brain predictors of CBT outcome in anxiety-related disorders (17 studies, n = 442).

Across different tasks, we observed that brain response in a network of regions involved in salience and interoception processing, encompassing fronto-insular (the right inferior frontal gyrus-anterior insular cortex) and fronto-limbic (the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex-dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) cortices was strongly associated with a positive CBT outcome.

Our results suggest that there are robust neural predictors of CBT outcome in anxiety-related disorders that may eventually lead (probably in combination with other data) to develop personalized approaches for the treatment of these mental disorders.