Reduced lateral prefrontal activation in adult patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during a working memory task: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study
Section snippets
Objectives of the study
During the last decades, the diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has gathered increasing interest both in clinical practice and research. Over the years, it has become apparent that ADHD is not only a childhood disorder, but that the symptomatology frequently persists in adulthood as a full or incomplete syndrome (Wender, 1998). The clinical symptomatology of ADHD is characterized by attentional deficits, motor hyperactivity, and increased impulsivity. On
Participants
Thirteen out-patients of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Wuerzburg fulfilling the diagnostic criteria for ADHD (ICD-10: F90.0) and 13 healthy volunteers participated in this study. Both groups did not differ significantly regarding their mean age (patients: 29.8 ± 8.0 years, control group: 26.8 ± 3.6 years; t17 = 1.23, p > 0.2), years of school education (10.2 ± 1.3 versus 10.5 ± 1.5; t25 = .065, p > 0.5), or gender distribution (ADHD patients: nine male, four female;
N-back performance
Mann-Whitney-U tests revealed that ADHD patients tended to make more omission errors than healthy controls in the 2-back condition of the n-back task (see Table 1). None of the other performance measures (omission errors during 1-back trials; commission errors; button presses (i.e. responses) irrespective of correctness) showed any statistically significant differences between the two groups.
NIRS data – O2Hb
For t-maps depicting the statistical differences between the two groups (healthy controls versus ADHD
Discussion
The present study investigated prefrontal changes in the concentration of oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin during performance of two versions of a classical working memory task, in a group of patients suffering from ADHD and an age- and gender-matched healthy control group. The analyses revealed that healthy controls exhibited stronger increases in the concentration of O2Hb than ADHD patients, particularly for the 2-back condition (the actual working memory task) and particularly for
Conflict of interest
All the authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest with respect to this study or its publication.
Role of funding source
The study was supported by grants of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to A.J.F. (KFO-125/1-2; Fa 361/8-3); the DFG had no further role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
Contributors
A.-C. Ehlis designed the study, wrote the protocol, statistically analyzed the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. C.G. Bähne was involved in data collection and analysis; she also contributed to writing the final version of the manuscript. C.P. Jacob was involved in patient recruitment and data collection; he also contributed to writing the final version of the manuscript. M.J. Herrmann was involved in working out the study design and writing the protocol. He also participated
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Hitachi Medical Corporation for the ETG-100 equipment and skilled technical support, and Melanie Harder and Inge Gröbner for their proficient technical assistance.
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2022, Physiology and BehaviorCognitive deficit in adults with ADHD lies in the cognitive state disorder rather than the working memory deficit: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study
2022, Journal of Psychiatric ResearchCitation Excerpt :This is not a comprehensive examination of the cognitive characteristics of adult ADHD in terms of behavioural performance and the temporal and spatial performance characteristics of brain area activation. Second, in terms of the research content, most previous research has only analysed the appearance of ADHD in the WM task (Ehlis et al., 2008; Wolf et al., 2009; Stroux et al., 2016), but did not explore whether ADHD's performance would be abnormal as memory load, stimulus novelty, and time duration changed. Specifically, Ehlis et al. (2008) used fNIRS to combine with N-back tasks while having a classification of high and low memory load, which also showed that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) of adult ADHD was activated abnormally in N-back tasks.
Human creativity escapes in the struggle against threat: Evidence from neural mechanisms
2022, Biological PsychologyCitation Excerpt :The supramarginal gyrus (SMG) plays a role in automatically activating relevant knowledge and maintaining attention, and is important in mental manipulation (Cogdell-Brooke et al., 2020; Fink et al., 2010). Therefore, a decrease in cortical activation may reflect a decrease in information manipulation ability and attentional resources (Ehlis et al., 2008), which prevents an individual from maintaining knowledge related to effective attention activation and analytical creativity, resulting in decreased creativity. Thus, in this study, decreased activation of the PFC and SMG can be understood in terms of attentional resources, i.e., threat leads to depletion of critical resources, triggering poor performance on cognitive tasks (Plessow et al., 2011).