Abstract
Individual variation in reward sensitivity may have an important role in early substance use and subsequent development of substance abuse. This may be especially important during adolescence, a transition period marked by approach behavior and a propensity toward risk taking, novelty seeking and alteration of the social landscape. However, little is known about the relative contribution of personality, behavior, and brain responses for prediction of alcohol use in adolescents. In this study, we applied factor analyses and structural equation modeling to reward-related brain responses assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging during a monetary incentive delay task. In addition, novelty seeking, sensation seeking, impulsivity, extraversion, and behavioral measures of risk taking were entered as predictors of early onset of drinking in a sample of 14-year-old healthy adolescents (N=324). Reward-associated behavior, personality, and brain responses all contributed to alcohol intake with personality explaining a higher proportion of the variance than behavior and brain responses. When only the ventral striatum was used, a small non-significant contribution to the prediction of early alcohol use was found. These data suggest that the role of reward-related brain activation may be more important in addiction than initiation of early drinking, where personality traits and reward-related behaviors were more significant. With up to 26% of explained variance, the interrelation of reward-related personality traits, behavior, and neural response patterns may convey risk for later alcohol abuse in adolescence, and thus may be identified as a vulnerability factor for the development of substance use disorders.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the IMAGEN project, which receives research funding from the European Community's Sixth Framework Program (LSHM-CT-2007-037286) and coordinated project ADAMS (242257), as well as the UK-NIHR-Biomedical Research Centre Mental Health, the MRC-Addiction Research Cluster ‘Genomic Biomarkers’, and the MRC program grant ‘Developmental pathways into adolescent substance abuse’ (93558). This research was also supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF grant no. 01EV071 l).
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During the past three years, GJB has received honoraria for teaching from General Electric Medical Systems. JG has received research funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, research funding from AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly & Co, Janssen-Cilag, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and speaker fees from AstraZeneca, Janssen-Cilag, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. TB served in an advisory or consultancy role for Bristol Myers-Sqibb, Develco Pharma, Lilly, Medice, Novartis, Shire, and Viforpharma. He received conference attendance support and conference support, and received speaker's fee from Lilly, Janssen McNeil, Medice, Novartis, Shire, and UCB. He has been involved in clinical trials conducted by Lilly, Shire, and Novartis. The present work is unrelated to the above grants and relationships. AH has received research funding from the German Research Foundation and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), Eli Lilly & Company, Janssen-Cilag, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. AH has received Speaker Honoraria from Janssen-Cilag, Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Pfizer, and Servier, TWR has disclosed consultancy with Cambridge Cognition, E. Lilly, Lundbeck, Pfizer, and GSK; research grants with E. Lilly, Lundbeck and GSK, and editorial honoraria with Springer Verlag (Psychopharmacology).
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Nees, F., Tzschoppe, J., Patrick, C. et al. Determinants of Early Alcohol Use In Healthy Adolescents: The Differential Contribution of Neuroimaging and Psychological Factors. Neuropsychopharmacol 37, 986–995 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2011.282
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2011.282
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