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

Christian Büchel (1) , Jan Peters (2) , Tobias Banaschewski (3) , Arun Bokde (4) , Uli Bromberg (5) , Patricia J Conrod (6) , Herta Flor (7) , Dimitri Papadopoulos-Orfanos (8) , Hugh G Garavan (9) , Penny Gowland (10) , Andreas Heinz (11) , Henrik Walter (11) , Bernd Ittermann (11) , Karl Mann (7) , Jean-Luc Martinot (12) , Luise Poustka (7) , Marcella Rietschel (13) , Trevor W. Robbins (14) , Michael N Smolka , Juergen Gallinat (11) , Gunter Schumann (15) , Brian Knutson

1 Institute for Systems Neuroscience
2 IAS - Intelligent Autonomous Systems
3 Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy [Mannheim]
4 Trinity College Dublin
5 UKE - Universitaetsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf = University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf [Hamburg]
6 Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London
7 Universität Mannheim [Mannheim]
8 NEUROSPIN - Service NEUROSPIN
9 University of Vermont [Burlington]
10 Sir Peter Mansfield Magnetic Resonance Centre [Nottingham]
11 Charité - UniversitätsMedizin = Charité - University Hospital [Berlin]
12 U1000 - Neuroimagerie en psychiatrie
13 Department of Genetic Epidemiology in Psychiatry [Mannhein]
14 Department of Experimental Psychology
15 Göttingen Zentrum Geowissenschaften

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 hyporesponsiveness 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.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]

Christian Büchel, Jan Peters, Tobias Banaschewski, Arun Bokde, Uli Bromberg, et al.. Blunted ventral striatal responses to anticipated rewards foreshadow problematic drug use in novelty-seeking adolescents. Nature Communications, 2017, 8, pp.14140. ⟨10.1038/ncomms14140⟩. ⟨cea-02138905⟩