Home > Blunted ventral striatal responses to anticipated rewards foreshadow problematic drug use in novelty-seeking adolescents.

Büchel, Christian and Peters, Jan and Banaschewski, Tobias and Bokde, Arun L W and Bromberg, Uli and Conrod, Patricia J and Flor, Herta and Papadopoulos, Dimitri and Garavan, Hugh and Gowland, Penny and Heinz, Andreas and Walter, Henrik and Ittermann, Bernd and Mann, Karl and Martinot, Jean-Luc and Paillère-Martinot, Marie-Laure and Nees, Frauke and Paus, Tomas and Pausova, Zdenka and Poustka, Luise and Rietschel, Marcella and Robbins, Trevor W and Smolka, Michael N and Gallinat, Juergen and Schumann, Gunter and Knutson, Brian (2017) Blunted ventral striatal responses to anticipated rewards foreshadow problematic drug use in novelty-seeking adolescents. Nature Communications, 8, p. 14140.

External website: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC53217...

Novelty-seeking tendencies in adolescents may promote innovation as well as problematic impulsive behaviour, including drug abuse. Previous research has not clarified whether neural hyper- or hypo-responsiveness to anticipated rewards promotes vulnerability in these individuals. Here we use a longitudinal design to track 144 novelty-seeking adolescents at age 14 and 16 to determine whether neural activity in response to anticipated rewards predicts problematic drug use. We find that diminished BOLD activity in mesolimbic (ventral striatal and midbrain) and prefrontal cortical (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) regions during reward anticipation at age 14 predicts problematic drug use at age 16. Lower psychometric conscientiousness and steeper discounting of future rewards at age 14 also predicts problematic drug use at age 16, but the neural responses independently predict more variance than psychometric measures. Together, these findings suggest that diminished neural responses to anticipated rewards in novelty-seeking adolescents may increase vulnerability to future problematic drug use.


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