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Differences in attentional control and white matter microstructure in adolescents with attentional, affective, and behavioral disorders

Brain Imaging and Behavior volume 14, pages 599–614 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical time of physiological, cognitive, and social development. It is also a time of increased risk-taking and vulnerability for psychopathology. White matter (WM) changes during adolescence have been better elucidated in the last decade, but how WM is impacted by psychopathology during this time remains unclear. Here, we examined the link between WM microstructure and psychopathology during adolescence. Twenty youth diagnosed with affective, attentional, and behavioral disorders (clinical sample), and 20 age-matched controls were recruited to examine group differences in WM microstructure, attentional control, and the link between them. The main results showed that clinical sample had relatively lower attentional control and fractional anisotropy (FA) in WM throughout the brain: two association tracts were identified, and many differences were found in areas rich in callosal and projection fibers. Moreover, increased FA was positively associated with attention performance in the clinical sample in structures supporting ventral WM pathways, whereas a similar link was identified in controls in dorsal WM association fibers. Overall, these results support a model of general impairment in WM microstructure combined with reliance on altered, perhaps less efficient, pathways for attentional control in youth with affective, attentional, and behavioral disorders.

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Acknowledgments

During the preparation of this manuscript, A.T.S. was supported by the Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health (NIH). F.D. was supported by a Helen Corley Petit Scholarship in Liberal Arts and Sciences and an Emanuel Donchin Professorial Scholarship in Psychology from the University of Illinois. The authors wish to thank Denise Adams, Dylan Lampan, and Gerald Trach for assistance with data collection, and Matt Moore and Yifan Hu for assistance with data analyses. The authors thank Cindy Clark, NIH Library Writing Center, for manuscript editing assistance.

Funding

This research was supported by an Emerging Team Grant from the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University Alberta (RES0002614), and by funding from the Lotte & John Hecht Memorial Foundation (RES0006762) awarded to S.V., J. VV., F.D., and A.S.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience, National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Andrea T. Shafer

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    James R. Benoit, Matthew R. G. Brown, Andy J. Greenshaw, Sunita Vohra & Florin Dolcos

  3. Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Andy J. Greenshaw, Florin Dolcos & Anthony Singhal

  4. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    K. Jessica Van Vliet

  5. Departments of Pediatrics and Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Sunita Vohra

  6. Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Florin Dolcos

  7. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Florin Dolcos

  8. Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Anthony Singhal

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  1. Andrea T. Shafer
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  2. James R. Benoit
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  5. K. Jessica Van Vliet
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  6. Sunita Vohra
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  7. Florin Dolcos
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  8. Anthony Singhal
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Contributions

FD, AS, SV, and KJVV designed the study; ATS collected the data; ATS and JRB constructed the preprocessing pipeline; ATS, AS, and FD contributed to the analytical approach, with input from JRB; ATS performed the analyses; ATS, AS, and FD wrote the manuscript. All authors provided feedback and approved the content of the article.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Andrea T. Shafer or Anthony Singhal.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

“All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.”

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from the parents of all individual adolescent participants included in the study, and informed assent was obtained from all adolescents included in the study.

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Andrea T. Shafer and James R. Benoit Shared first authorship.

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Shafer, A.T., Benoit, J.R., Brown, M.R.G. et al. Differences in attentional control and white matter microstructure in adolescents with attentional, affective, and behavioral disorders. Brain Imaging and Behavior 14, 599–614 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-019-00211-7

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Keywords

  • DTI
  • Imaging
  • ADHD
  • Emotion
  • Adolescent
  • Cognition
  • Mental health