Given their typical age of onset, a broad range of mental disorders are increasingly being understood as the result of aberrations of developmental processes that normally occur in the adolescent brain.4 — 6 Executive functioning, and its neurobiological substrate, the prefrontal cortex, matures during adolescence.5 The relatively late maturation of executive functioning is adaptive in most cases, underpinning characteristic adolescent behaviours such as social interaction, risk taking and sensation seeking which promote successful adult development and independence.6 However, in some cases it appears that the delayed maturation of prefrontal regulatory regions leads to the development of mental illness, with neurobiological studies indicating a broad deficit in executive functioning which precedes and underpins a range of psychopathology.7 A recent meta - analysis of
neuroimaging studies focusing on a range of psychotic and non-psychotic mental illnesses found that grey matter loss in the dorsal anterior cingulate, and left and right insula, was common across diagnoses.8 In a healthy sample, this study also demonstrated that lower grey matter in these regions was found to be associated with deficits in executive functioning performance.
Not exact matches
«In this
study, we
focused on the activity of the anterior cingulate cortex, which has been shown by others to be related to error processing, and which we have shown to be associated with fatigue,» said Dr. Wylie, who is associate director of Neuroscience Research and the Rocco Ortenzio
Neuroimaging Center at Kessler Foundation.
Latest trends in
neuroimaging studies are
focusing more on scalability issues both related to larger data samples and cpu intensive computational methods.
In conclusion,
neuroimaging studies that have examined the neural correlates of face processing in disruptive behavior problems have exclusively
focused on conduct disorder and they did not take into account the impact of anxiety.
Her research interests
focus on
studying the neural correlates of PTSD using
neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and treatment outcome research examining various pharmacological and psychotherapeutic methods.