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    • Researchers have previously examined how hormonal changes

    2018-11-07

    Researchers have previously examined how hormonal changes related to pubertal development coincide with changes in alcohol consumption. Puberty onset starts approximately around age 9–10, although on average about 1.5 years earlier for girls than for boys, and it is marked by changes in both hormone levels and physical appearance (Susman and Rogol, 2004). Congruent with these changes, adolescents experience changes in the social, emotional and academic domains. Puberty specific change may instigate a transition not only in physical appearance, but also in social-affective domains such as risk-taking behavior, and specifically alcohol consumption. In a previous study we measured alcohol use in the last month and total lifetime use. We showed that in both boys and girls, more advanced puberty was associated with higher levels of alcohol consumption, while controlling for age. In addition, boys who had higher baseline levels of testosterone were also more likely to have consumed alcohol (de Water et al., 2013). The psychological and hormonal changes in relation to puberty occur in conjunction with structural (Goddings et al., 2014; Peper et al., 2013) and functional changes in the MDV 3100 (Blakemore et al., 2010), but few studies examined how affective brain reactivity and hormone levels relate to individual differences in alcohol consumption. One target region for affective brain reactivity in adolescence is the ventral striatum. Recent studies have shown that neural responses in the ventral striatum to rewards are heightened during adolescence, compared to childhood and adulthood (Braams et al., 2014; Galvan et al., 2006; Van Leijenhorst et al., 2010). Especially the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a key region for processing rewards, shows elevated responses during adolescence. Intriguingly, neural activity in the NAcc corresponded with testosterone levels in early adolescence (Forbes et al., 2010; Op de Macks et al., 2011), and with self-reported risk taking tendencies (Galvan et al., 2007). In a recent longitudinal study including 299 participants, we examined NAcc activity across the whole range of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood using a simple gambling task that could result in gains or losses. We confirmed the adolescent peak in NAcc activity to rewards at two time points (Braams et al., 2015). The peak in neural activation in NAcc and the peak in risk taking behavior observed in adolescence are likely to be related. However, few studies have found a direct relationship between the two, possibly due to relatively small sample sizes of neuroimaging studies that assessed both neural reward sensitivity and alcohol consumption. The current study aimed to shed light on the relationship between NAcc responses to rewards, testosterone levels and self-reported alcohol use in a longitudinal sample. We made use of the neural activity data that were previously reported in Braams et al. (2015). This longitudinal study examined neural activity to rewards during adolescence across two time points. In addition to the fMRI session, participants were asked to fill out an alcohol consumption questionnaire that tested three domains of alcohol use: average alcohol consumption per evening, alcohol consumption in the last month and total lifetime alcohol consumption. For a total of 169 participants between 12 and 26 years of age complete data on all measures was available. We hypothesized that age and alcohol use would be positively correlated, replicating prior studies (Spear, 2013). In addition, we hypothesized that the participants who showed elevated responses to rewards during a gambling task in the scanner, would also report higher use of alcohol, consistent with the hypothesis that adolescent specific changes in affective neural activity is related to higher risk taking (Galvan et al., 2007). Furthermore, we expect that higher levels of testosterone correspond with higher alcohol consumption (de Water et al., 2013). Given the longitudinal design, we were able to test whether neural activity and testosterone merely coincide with higher alcohol use, or also predict alcohol use at the second time point.