Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health discovered the possible link after an experiment to detect brain activity in nervous monkeys.

A PET scan of the brains of agitated young rhesus monkeys showed heightened brain activity in the organ's amygdala and anterior hippocampus parts.

Monitoring those parts of the brain in humans could help predict and treat high levels of anxiety, according to the researchers' study published in the journal Nature.

Med Kalin, who led the study, plans to conduct a similar experiment on children to see if the same brain regions in human produce anxiety.

Basically the idea and the hope would be we could intervene in a way that we could, more or less permanently, change a young child's brain such that they would not have to struggle with these problems, says Kalin, according to Abc.net.au.