NEW RESEARCH
Morphometric Brain Abnormalities in Boys With Conduct Disorder

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ABSTRACT

Objective

Children with the early-onset type of conduct disorder (CD) are at high risk for developing an antisocial personality disorder. Although there have been several neuroimaging studies on morphometric differences in adults with antisocial personality disorder, little is known about structural brain aberrations in boys with CD.

Method

Magnetic resonance imaging and voxel-based morphometry were used to assess abnormalities in gray matter volumes in 23 boys ages 12 to 17 years with CD (17 comorbid for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) in comparison with age- and IQ-matched controls.

Results

Compared with healthy controls, mean gray matter volume was 6% smaller in the clinical group. Compared with controls, reduced gray matter volumes were found in the left orbitofrontal region and bilaterally in the temporal lobes, including the amygdala and hippocampus on the left side in the CD group. Regression analyses in the clinical group indicated an inverse association of hyperactive/impulsive symptoms and widespread gray matter abnormalities in the frontoparietal and temporal cortices. By contrast, CD symptoms correlated primarily with gray matter reductions in limbic brain structures.

Conclusions

The data suggest that boys with CD and comorbid attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder show brain abnormalities in frontolimbic areas that resemble structural brain deficits, which are typically observed in adults with antisocial behavior.

Section snippets

Sample

Because the broad majority of CD individuals are males and to rule out sex-specific differences in brain structures, only boys were included in this study.24 In total, thirty 12- to 17-year-old male white adolescents diagnosed with the childhood-onset type of CD participated in our investigation. Seven of them had to be excluded because of movement artifacts during scanning (see below). The remaining 23 subjects were analyzed in this study. Twenty-three control subjects were recruited by board

RESULTS

The clinical and control groups were matched for age and IQ (Table 1). Seventeen (74%) of the 23 subjects investigated by MRI scanning also met the criteria for ADHD. No differences in age or IQ were found between the groups using a two-tailed t test.

DISCUSSION

In this study, we investigated regional differences in gray matter volumes of twenty-three 12- to 17-year-old boys with CD (17 of whom also met the criteria for ADHD) compared with 23 healthy control subjects. We performed a VBM analysis of the whole brain to assess anatomical correlates of CD and ADHD instead of using the hypothesis-driven manual measurement of single structures. In addition, subjects were examined twice, once each in childhood and adolescence, to verify the childhood-onset

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    Accepted October 28, 2007, under the Editorship of Mina K. Dulcan, M.D.

    Drs. Huebner and Vloet contributed equally to the manuscript.

    This research was supported by DFG funding (HE 2660/3-2).

    A poster appended to this study was presented at the 17th World Congress of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP) 2006 in Melbourne, Australia, and received an award.

    Disclosure: Dr. Herpertz-Dahlmann is a consultant to Eli Lilly and has received research funding from AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Novartis, and Janssen Cilag. The other authors report no conflicts of interest.

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