of impulsiveness (Congdon and Canli 2008), attentional, motor and nonplanning impulsiveness. (Patton, et al. 1995), and the trait they are thought to form in ...
Structural cerebral correlates of impulsiveness in healthy subjects Schilling, Christina1, 2; Kühn, Simone1, 3; Romanowski, Alexander1; Schubert, Florian4; Heinz, Andreas1; Kathmann, Norbert2; Gallinat, Jürgen1 1
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité University Medicine Campus Mitte, St. Hedwig Krankenhaus, Große Hamburger Str. 5-11, 10115 Berlin, Germany; 2Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Rudower Chaussee 18, 12489 Berlin, Germany; 3Department of Experimental Psychology and Ghent Institute for Functional and Metabolic Imaging, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium; 4Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Abbestraße 2-12, 10587 Berlin, Germany
The IMAGEN study receives research funding from the European Community’s Sixth Framework Programme (LSHM-CT-2007-037286) and is supported by the UK Department of Health NIHRBiomedical Research Centre ‘Mental Health’ and the MRC programme grant “Developmental pathways into adolescents’ substance abuse”. Introduction Impulsiveness is a central dimension of human personality and of relevance for the development of substance use and certain psychiatric disorders. Even though it has been associated with mental health problems such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder and suicidal behavior, only little is known about its underlying neural correlates. In particular, brain morphometry studies in healthy subjects, for whom mechanisms of impulsiveness are not confounded with disease-specific variables, are very rare. Our studies investigate whether there are common and distinct morphological correlates of the three most prominent dimensions of impulsiveness (Congdon and Canli 2008), attentional, motor and nonplanning impulsiveness (Patton, et al. 1995), and the trait they are thought to form in healthy individuals (Cloninger 1986). Methods High-resolution anatomical magnetic resonance images were obtained on a 3-Tesla scanner. For the first study the gray-white and pial surfaces for each individual cortex was modeled and the distance between these surfaces was computed as a measure of cortical thickness (CT; (Fischl and Dale 2000). Associations between CT and the dimensions of impulsiveness (BarrattImpulsiveness-Scale 11, BIS) were identified in whole brain analyses in 32 healthy adult subjects. In the second study clusters of gray matter (GM) volume associated with trait impulsiveness, Cloningers’ revised temperament and character inventory impulsiveness (TCI-R-I), were identified in a whole brain analysis using optimized voxel-based morphometry in 115 healthy adolescents from the IMAGEN project (Schumann, et al. 2010). Results In the first study we observed significant negative correlations between left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) CT and the attention BIS score (FDR p
