Predicting development of adolescent drinking behaviour from whole brain structure at 14 years of age

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • University of Hamburg
  • Max Planck Institute for Human Development
  • Heidelberg University 
  • Trinity College Dublin
  • King's College London (KCL)
  • University of Mannheim
  • French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA)
  • University of Vermont
  • University of Nottingham
  • Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
  • Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt
  • INSERM - Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale
  • Bloorview Research Institute
  • University of Toronto
  • University of Göttingen

Abstract

Adolescence is a common time for initiation of alcohol use and development of alcohol use disorders. The present study investigates neuroanatomical predictors for trajectories of future alcohol use based on a novel voxel-wise whole-brain structural equation modeling framework. In 1814 healthy adolescents of the IMAGEN sample, the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) was acquired at three measurement occasions across five years. Based on a two-part latent growth curve model, we conducted whole-brain analyses on structural MRI data at age 14, predicting change in alcohol use score over time. Higher grey-matter volumes in the caudate nucleus and the left cerebellum at age 14 years were predictive of stronger increase in alcohol use score over 5 years. The study is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of running separate voxel-wise structural equation models thereby opening new avenues for data analysis in brain imaging.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere44056
JournaleLife
Volume8
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 31262402
ORCID /0000-0001-5398-5569/work/161890737
ORCID /0000-0002-8493-6396/work/161891651