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The relationship of impulsivity and cortical thickness in depressed and non-depressed adolescents

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Abstract

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is recognized to be heterogeneous in terms of brain structure abnormality findings across studies, which might reflect previously unstudied traits that confer variability to neuroimaging measurements. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between different types of trait impulsivity and MDD diagnosis on adolescent brain structure. We predicted that adolescents with depression who were high on trait impulsivity would have more abnormal cortical structure than depressed patients or non-MDD who were low on impulsivity. We recruited 58 subjects, including 29 adolescents (ages 12–19) with a primary DSM-IV diagnosis of MDD and a history of suicide attempt and 29 demographically-matched healthy control participants. Our GLM-based analyses sought to describe differences in the linear relationships between cortical thickness and impulsivity trait levels. As hypothesized, we found significant moderation effects in rostral middle frontal gyrus and right paracentral lobule cortical thickness for different subscales of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale. However, although these brain-behavior relationships differed between diagnostic study groups, they were not simple additive effects as we had predicted. For the middle frontal gyrus, non-MDD participants showed a strong positive association between cortical thickness and BIS-11 Motor scores, while MDD-diagnosed participants showed a negative association. For Non-Planning Impulsiveness, paracentral lobule cortical thickness was observed with greater impulsivity in MDD, but no association was found for controls. In conclusion, the findings confirm that dimensions of impulsivity have discrete neural correlates, and show that relationships between impulsivity and brain structure are expressed differently in adolescents with MDD compared to non-MDD.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by a grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Special thanks go to the research staff who helped collect the data for the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Rutgers University Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 675 Hoes Ln W, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Yuli Fradkin

  2. Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Hartford Hospital / The Institute of Living, 200 Retreat Avenue, Whitehall Building, Hartford, CT, 06106, USA

    Sabin Khadka, Katie L. Bessette & Michael C. Stevens

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA

    Michael C. Stevens

Authors
  1. Yuli Fradkin
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  2. Sabin Khadka
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  3. Katie L. Bessette
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  4. Michael C. Stevens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael C. Stevens.

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Conflict of interest

Drs. Fradkin and Stevens and Ms. Bessette and Mr. Khadka declare that none of them have a conflict of interest in the research described in this article.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of Hartford Hospital’s institutional review board (IRB), and met standards described in the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. As most participants were legal minors, informed assent was accompanied by parental permission using procedures approved by the institutional IRB. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Supplemental Figure 1

Regions showing significant difference in correlation between sensitivity to punishment and cortical thickness in depressed vs. healthy controls. (GIF 617 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 808 kb)

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Fradkin, Y., Khadka, S., Bessette, K.L. et al. The relationship of impulsivity and cortical thickness in depressed and non-depressed adolescents. Brain Imaging and Behavior 11, 1515–1525 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-016-9612-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-016-9612-8

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