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Review
. 2010 Dec;49(12):1189-201; quiz 1285.
doi: 10.1016/j.jaac.2010.08.017. Epub 2010 Oct 8.

Neurobiology of the adolescent brain and behavior: implications for substance use disorders

B J Casey  1 , Rebecca M Jones
Affiliations
Review

Neurobiology of the adolescent brain and behavior: implications for substance use disorders

B J Casey et al. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2010 Dec.

Abstract

Objective: Adolescence is a developmental period that entails substantial changes in risk-taking behavior and experimentation with alcohol and drugs. Understanding how the brain is changing during this period relative to childhood and adulthood and how these changes vary across individuals are key in predicting risk for later substance abuse and dependence.

Method: This review discusses recent human imaging and animal work in the context of an emerging view of adolescence as characterized by a tension between early emerging "bottom-up" systems that express exaggerated reactivity to motivational stimuli and later maturing "top-down" cognitive control regions. Behavioral, clinical, and neurobiological evidences are reported for dissociating these two systems developmentally. The literature on the effects of alcohol and its rewarding properties in the brain is discussed in the context of these two systems.

Results: Collectively, these studies show curvilinear development of motivational behavior and the underlying subcortical brain regions, with a peak inflection from 13 to 17 years. In contrast, prefrontal regions, important in top-down regulation of behavior, show a linear pattern of development well into young adulthood that parallels that seen in behavioral studies of impulsivity.

Conclusions: The tension or imbalance between these developing systems during adolescence may lead to cognitive control processes being more vulnerable to incentive-based modulation and increased susceptibility to the motivational properties of alcohol and drugs. As such, behavior challenges that require cognitive control in the face of appetitive cues may serve as useful biobehavioral markers for predicting which teens may be at greater risk for alcohol and substance dependence.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Cartoon model of ventral striatal and prefrontal cortex (PFC) interactions across development. Deeper color indicates greater regional signaling. Line represents functional connectivity, with solid line indicating mature connection and dotted line indicating immaturity (from ).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Illustration of different developmental courses for sensation- seeking and impulsivity. Panel A. Plot of sensation-seeking and impulsivity as a function of age (adapted from ). Panel B. Plot of patterns of activity in brain regions sensitive to reward outcomes during a cognitive control task across development (adapted from , ).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Ventral Striatal activity to reward and association with risk- taking. Localization of ventral striatum in axial plane (left panel), which is activated with reward (middle panel) and correlated with risk-taking (right panel) (adapted from , )
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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