2.15 ADOLESCENT FEMALE PATIENTS WITH SEVERE SUBSTANCE AND CONDUCT PROBLEMS: HYPOACTIVITY OF THE RETROSPLENIAL CORTICAL REGION OF THE DEFAULT MODE NETWORK

• Published in: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Vol. 55; no. 10; p. S125
• Main Authors: Chumachenko, Serhiy, Dalwani, Manish, Sakai, Joseph
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Elsevier Inc 01.10.2016; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Adolescents; Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Biological markers; Brain; Brain mapping; Brain research; Brodmann's area; Child & adolescent psychiatry; Comorbidity; Conduct disorder; Cortex; Data processing; Decision making; Drug Use; Drugs; Episodic memory; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Gender differences; Handedness; Inhibitory processes; Medical diagnosis; Mental disorders; Multivariate analysis; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Patients; Pediatrics; Psychiatry; Risk taking; Teenagers
• ISSN: 0890-8567; 1527-5418
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jaac.2016.09.081

Objectives: CD and SUD are highly comorbid, and both are characterized by problems of inhibitory control. To date, very limited research has linked CD and SUD in adolescents to differences in the brain's default mode network (DMN). Because CD and SUD present differently between genders, we wanted to examine this relationship between CD and SUD in an all-female sample group. Methods: Adolescent females (N = 21) with severe substance and conduct problems and healthy control subjects (N = 20; aged 14-18 years, mean = 16.5 years) played a risk-taking decision task with interspersed periods of rest within a fMRI machine. Independent component analysis (a data-driven analytic technique involving multivariate analysis of all fMRI voxels in a given image to extract functionally connected brain networks) was used to extract the DMN component, and the component signal's intensity was analyzed for group differences. Results: Patients showed significantly decreased DMN activity bilaterally in the retrosplenial cortex (Brodmann area 29 and 30), and this effect remained even after accounting for several potential confounds, including measures of ADHD and MDD, current medication use, or handedness. These findings replicate our previous results in the retrosplenial cortices of the DMN component using an all-male adolescent sample group. Conclusions: Our findings suggest an across-gender replicable, functional, neurological connection between severe adolescent substance and conduct problems and a brain region involved in episodic memory recall and internal mentation. With continued investigation, such patient-control differences in DMN activity in the retrosplenial cortex could potentially be used to aid in the diagnosis of CD and SUD as an objective biomarker or to help qualitatively track treatment