Identifying functional connectomics abnormality in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Abstract

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common psychiatric, neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioral disorders occurring in the childhood of human. The typical symptoms are characterized as excessive inattention, hyperactivity/impulsiveness or their combination. Traditionally, it has been thought to be a partial dysfunction caused by prefrontal-striatal circuits. Recent studies, however, indicate the involvement of other brain regions, including the occipital cortex and temporal cortex. Though researchers have already realized the importance of evaluation for the whole brain and multiple structural/functional networks, it is still very challenging to achieve consistent and comparable results across different labs. In the present paper, through the predefined cortical landmarks which possess group-wise structural consistency and intrinsic correspondence, we have the opportunity to access the whole brain and to reveal large-scale structural/functional connectomics abnormalities in ADHD. Our results not only confirmed that the major white matter (WM) alterations occurred at the anterior and posterior regions, but also indicate that hyper-interactions mainly exist between the emotion network and memory related networks. Our results also showed that hypo-interactions are found between the emotion and execution/attention networks. Hence, we hypothesize that the abnormal interactions associated with emotion network contribute to the dysfunction within the ADHD brain.