Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchNeuroeconomics and Adolescent Substance Abuse: Individual Differences in Neural Networks and Delay Discounting
Section snippets
Neural Mechanisms of DD
A meta-analysis identified 25 regions of significant neural activation during DD tasks.9 Three primary regions of robust activation include value-related regions (ventral striatum), value consideration regions (medial prefrontal cortex [PFC]), and future forecasting regions (posterior cingulate cortex). These regions are consistent with the valuation network proposed by Peters and Buchel,10 who also proposed 2 additional networks important in DD: a cognitive control network, involving
Participants
Participants were recruited from 2 ongoing studies investigating behavioral treatments for adolescent substance abuse (marijuana trial and alcohol trial). Fifty-two subjects enrolled in the treatment studies during recruitment for the present study. Two teens refused screening and 9 screened eligible but declined to participate in this study. Six subjects were not eligible for MRI owing to metal in their body (most often braces), and 2 reported claustrophobia and were not scanned. In addition,
Pairwise Contrasts
Voxel-wise, brain-wide planned contrasts of SS-CON and LL-CON choices resulted in distributed neural activations typically attributed to impulsive and deliberative choice behavior. Task-related activations are reported in Table S3, Table S4, available online, and represent those that survived a cluster-level correction for multiple comparisons.
SS Versus CON
Compared with the judgment of relative monetary amount in the CON trials, the choice of SS rewards was associated with activation of the dorsomedial,
Discussion
Whole-brain pairwise contrasts indicated extensive activations broadly consistent with many other DD fMRI studies.9 Group ICA yielded 7 components reflecting theoretically consistent regions of neural coactivation during all trials. Activation in 2 components or networks showed significant relations with individual DD rates. However, neither effect survived the Bonferroni correction, supporting the need to replicate these findings. One network, a putative valuation network, showed ventral
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2021, International Journal of PsychophysiologyCitation Excerpt :Similar effect was found in pathological gamblers that the episodic tags could enhance the striatal valuation signals during temporal discounting (Wiehler et al., 2017). In parallel to these results, studies showed that imaging future events allowed for increasing value on the later-larger rewards, biasing the subsequent decisions towards choices with a higher long-term pay-off (Benoit et al., 2011; Stanger et al., 2013). Intriguingly, higher identification levels were characteristic of the disengagement from immediate context to act in the light of distal significance (Vallacher and Wegner, 1989).
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2020, Journal of the Neurological SciencesCitation Excerpt :In parallel, Stanger et al. [118], in their study on adolescents in treatment for AUD and marijuana use disorder (MUD), found participants with higher discounting rates had less deactivation throughout the reward network and less activation in more frontal areas than those with lower discounting rates [118]. While over one third of participants in this sample had comorbid ADHD, it is unclear how that diagnosis interacts with SUDs to affect neural response discounting rates [118]. However, another group found that adolescents with ADHD had lower activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus, dorsolateral PFC, anterior insula, dorsal striatum and bilateral cerebellum during the delayed discounting task, independent of discounting rates, relative to healthy comparisons [94].
This research was funded by National Institute on Drug Abuse grants DA029442, DA015186, and DA022981, by National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant AA016917, and by UL1TR000039 and KL2TR000063 through the NIH National Center for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
Disclosure: Dr. Stanger has received support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Sturgis Foundation. Dr. Budney has received support from the NIH. Dr. Kilts has received support from the NIH and has attended a scientific advisory board meeting for Allergan and a national advisory board meeting for a mental health facility (Skyland Trail). He is a co-holder of U.S. patent 6,373,990 (“Method and Device for the Transdermal Delivery of Lithium”). Drs. Elton, James, and Ryan report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.