Neural and genetic underpinnings of response inhibition in adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(NeuroIMAGE)
Daan van Rooij investigated the neural and genetic underpinnings of response inhibition, in a large cohort of adolescents with ADHD, their unaffected siblings, and healthy controls. He first investigated the neural activation patterns during response inhibition in adolescents with ADHD and their unaffected siblings. He demonstrated reduced activation in these groups in many important nodes of inhibition and attentional networks, and linked this hypoactivation to behavioral differences in task performance and ADHD phenotype. He also studied the functional connectivity patterns underlying response inhibition, and demonstrated that adolescents with ADHD both show decreased integration of the response inhibition network, and decreased suppression of task irrelevant networks.
Results
He found that siblings show similar deficits, but also unique compensatory connectivity patterns. Finally, he showed that several genetic variants from the dopamine and serotonin pathways respectively affect the neural activation patterns during response inhibition. He found that these activation patterns are predictive of task performance, and also that these effects do not differ between the three diagnostic groups. Taken together, these findings provided new insight into the neural underpinnings of the response inhibition deficits observed in ADHD, and demonstrated how these neural correlates can explain additional variance in the ADHD phenotype above behavioral measures of response inhibition. Additionally, these findings suggest that the neural correlates of response inhibition can link genetic variants to neuropsychological performance.
What do these results mean for practice?
The results of Daan's research help us to better understand how and why unwanted behavior develops in children with ADHD.
Collaboration
We conducted this research in collaboration with the University of Groningen (RUG) and the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (Radboud University Nijmegen).