Anticipatory and Consummatory Responses Across Reward Domains in Adolescents With Anorexia Nervosa.

Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by a tendency to limit intake of food, with specific restriction of foods that are generally considered highly palatable. This observation raises questions about whether reward processing is disturbed in AN. This study examined whether adolescents with AN differ from healthy control peers (HC) in anticipatory and consummatory reward processing.

Causal effects of psychostimulants on neural connectivity: a mechanistic, randomized clinical trial.

Background: Psychostimulants are frequently used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but side effects are common leading to many patients discontinuing treatment. Identifying neural mechanisms by which psychostimulants attenuate symptoms may guide the development of more refined and tolerable therapeutics.

Methods: We conducted a 12-week, randomized, placebo-controlled trial (RCT) of a long-acting amphetamine, lisdexamfetamine (LDEX), in patients with ADHD, ages 6-25 years old.

The association between prenatal concentrations of polybrominated diphenyl ether and child cognitive and psychomotor function.

Unlabelled: Previous studies suggest a negative association between prenatal polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) exposure and child cognitive and psychomotor development. However, the timing of the relationship between PBDE exposure and neurodevelopment is still unclear. We examined the association between PBDE concentration at two different prenatal times (early and late pregnancy) and cognitive function in children 6-8 years of age.

Frontoparietal and default mode network connectivity varies with age and intelligence.

Background: Anticorrelated resting state connectivity between task-positive and task-negative networks in adults supports flexible shifting between externally focused attention and internal thought. Findings suggest that children show positive correlations between task-positive (frontoparietal; FP) and task-negative (default mode; DMN) networks. FP-DMN connectivity also associates with intellectual functioning across the lifespan.

Associations between Amygdala-Prefrontal Functional Connectivity and Age Depend on Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status.

Although severe early life stress has been shown to accelerate the development of frontolimbic resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC), less is known about the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage, a prolonged and multifaceted stressor. In a cross-sectional study of 127 participants aged 5-25, we examined whether lower neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES; measured by Area Deprivation Index and neighborhood poverty and educational attainment) was associated with prematurely reduced amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) RSFC. We further tested whether neighborhood SES was more predictive than household SES and whether SES effects on connectivity were associated with anxiety symptoms.