TY - JOUR
T1 - Atypical pulvinar-cortical pathways during sustained attention performance in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
AU - Li, Xiaobo
AU - Sroubek, Ariane
AU - Kelly, Mary S.
AU - Lesser, Iris
AU - Sussman, Elyse
AU - He, Yong
AU - Branch, Craig
AU - Foxe, John J.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the Rose F. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (RFK-IDDRC) through a program grant ( HD071593 ) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the staff at the Human Clinical Phenotyping Core (HCP) of the RFK-IDDRC during the recruitment and clinical classification of a portion of the participants.
PY - 2012/11
Y1 - 2012/11
N2 - Objective: The neurobiological basis of inattentiveness, a core feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is not yet well understood. Structural abnormalities in thalamus, especially the pulvinar nuclei, have recently been reported in ADHD. Pulvinar nuclei maintain reciprocal connections with cortical/subcortical areas, and play a central coordinating role during visual attention processing. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that children and young adolescents with ADHD would show atypical pulvinar-cortical functional pathways during sustained attention performance, and that these functional abnormalities would be associated with the inattentive symptoms of the disorder. Method: Visual attention task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 22 children and young adolescents with ADHD and 22 demographically matched, normal control subjects were analyzed. Cortical activation maps and temporal correlations of activity patterns between pulvinar nuclei and the remainder of brain were constructed for each participant. Correlations between activation magnitude of pulvinar and diagnostic measures were calculated in subjects with ADHD. Results: Compared to controls, subjects with ADHD showed significantly reduced pulvinar activations bilaterally, significantly decreased functional connectivity between bilateral pulvinar and right prefrontal regions, and significantly increased connectivity between the right pulvinar and bilateral occipital regions. In addition, the activation magnitude in the left pulvinar was negatively correlated with the DSM-IV inattentive index in ADHD group. Conclusions: Allied with previous evidence of structural abnormalities in pulvinar, the current data suggest that inappropriate development of pulvinar may lead to disrupted functional circuits for visual attention processing, and that these disruptions contribute significantly to the pathophysiological mechanisms of the inattentiveness symptoms in ADHD.
AB - Objective: The neurobiological basis of inattentiveness, a core feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is not yet well understood. Structural abnormalities in thalamus, especially the pulvinar nuclei, have recently been reported in ADHD. Pulvinar nuclei maintain reciprocal connections with cortical/subcortical areas, and play a central coordinating role during visual attention processing. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that children and young adolescents with ADHD would show atypical pulvinar-cortical functional pathways during sustained attention performance, and that these functional abnormalities would be associated with the inattentive symptoms of the disorder. Method: Visual attention task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 22 children and young adolescents with ADHD and 22 demographically matched, normal control subjects were analyzed. Cortical activation maps and temporal correlations of activity patterns between pulvinar nuclei and the remainder of brain were constructed for each participant. Correlations between activation magnitude of pulvinar and diagnostic measures were calculated in subjects with ADHD. Results: Compared to controls, subjects with ADHD showed significantly reduced pulvinar activations bilaterally, significantly decreased functional connectivity between bilateral pulvinar and right prefrontal regions, and significantly increased connectivity between the right pulvinar and bilateral occipital regions. In addition, the activation magnitude in the left pulvinar was negatively correlated with the DSM-IV inattentive index in ADHD group. Conclusions: Allied with previous evidence of structural abnormalities in pulvinar, the current data suggest that inappropriate development of pulvinar may lead to disrupted functional circuits for visual attention processing, and that these disruptions contribute significantly to the pathophysiological mechanisms of the inattentiveness symptoms in ADHD.
KW - ADHD
KW - attention
KW - functional MRI
KW - pulvinar
KW - thalamo-cortical connectivity
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jaac.2012.08.013
DO - 10.1016/j.jaac.2012.08.013
M3 - Article
C2 - 23101745
AN - SCOPUS:84867897603
SN - 0890-8567
VL - 51
SP - 1197-1207.e4
JO - Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
IS - 11
ER -