Key components of antisocial personality disorder include irritability with anger dysregulation. Individuals with ASPD are quick tempered with anger outbursts commonly leading to physical or emotional aggressiveness towards others.
The emotional and behavioral abnormalities in ASPD may provide a model for studying specific brain regions controlling these functions. In the next few posts, I will review some of the brain imaging abnormalities that have been linked to ASPD. I will first begin by looking at a study of functional connectivity in juvenile offenders.
Shannon from Washington University in Saint Louis and colleagues from the Oregon Health and Science University and the University of New Mexico have published a study of the default network in a group of juvenile offenders.
The authors of this study note functional connectivity is a developmental process. Children's brain show different functional connectivity patterns than that of adults--children have strong short-distant connections while adults have stronger long-distant connections. They note that abnormal maturation patterns in functional connectivity have been linked to several clinical neuroscience disorders including ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. These finding support the potential for abnormal maturation patterns in conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder.
The key elements in the design of their study were:
Subjects: 122 juveniles incarcerated for a variety of crimes including physical and sexual assault contrasted with 95 control individuals
Scanning method: Mobile fMRI 1.5T scanner (cases) and 3.0T scanner (controls)
Scanning analysis: Resting state connectivity among brain systems
Psychometric assessment: Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-YV) consisting of a empathy subfactor and an impulsivity/need for stimulation factor
No resting connectivity abnormalities were linked to the empathy factor from the PCL-YV. However, some interesting findings were noted in the impulsivity domain. The found differences linked to impulsivity in the motor planning region of the cortex (premotor cortex).
High impulsivity scores common in the juvenile offender group was associated with connections between the motor planning region and regions linked to spontaneous behavior and self-referential cogniton.
In contrast, low impulsivity offenders and controls showed associations between this motor planning region with spatial attention and executive function and control.
Interestingly, the high impulsivity pattern of connectivity appeared common in the youngest controls. Older controls showed the typical motor planning-executive functioning connectivity.
The authors propose that "impulsivity in the offender population is a consequence of delay in typical development rather than a distinct abnormality".
The authors note that their finding raises the possibility that specific intervention strategies to modify functional maturation connectivity may promising. The relatively focal nature of deficits in this study support the potential for specific therapeutic remediation.
This finding in juvenile populations needs to be replicated in adult offender populations. Impulsivity and aggressiveness abnormalities in ASPD have an early age of onset and is persistent into adulthood for many individuals.
Nevertheless, designing specific impulsivity remediation treatments with serial functional connectivity maturation analysis holds promise for new secondary prevention strategies in ASPD.
Filtered image of a pair of laughing gulls from the author's file. Original photo can be found here.
Shannon BJ, Raichle ME, Snyder AZ, Fair DA, Mills KL, Zhang D, Bache K, Calhoun VD, Nigg JT, Nagel BJ, Stevens AA, & Kiehl KA (2011). Premotor functional connectivity predicts impulsivity in juvenile offenders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (27), 11241-5 PMID: 2170923621709236
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