Furthermore, thalamic GABA+ concentrations were significantly negatively correlated with BAI scores ( r = −0.467, p = 0.038) ( Figure 3B ), and while a negative trend with the KSS was observed, this did not reach statistical significance ( r = −0.419, p = 0.066) ( Figure 3C ).
Furthermore, a marginally significant interaction was observed between group and age [ F (2, 35) = 2.63, p = 0.086], suggesting that the effect of age on anxiety may differ across groups. 3.2 Thalamic neuro-metabolite differences between patients with insomnia and healthy controls As shown in Table 2 , compared with the healthy control group (mean ± SD: 3.056 ± 0.715), the insomnia group exhibited significantly lower thalamic GABA+ levels (2.623 ± 0.468; p = 0.027).