Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Nov:122:107034.
doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2021.107034. Epub 2021 Jun 29.

Child reward neurocircuitry and parental substance use history: Findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study

Amy E Kwarteng  1 , Muhammad M Rahman  1 , Dylan G Gee  2 , M Alejandra Infante  3 , Susan F Tapert  3 , Brenda L Curtis  4
Affiliations

Child reward neurocircuitry and parental substance use history: Findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study

Amy E Kwarteng et al. Addict Behav. 2021 Nov.

Abstract

Background: Substance use research has focused on family history of alcohol use disorders but less on other addictions in biological family members. We examined how parental substance use history relates to reward system functioning, specifically nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and putamen activation at age 9-10 in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. This research hopes to address limitations in prior literature by focusing analyses on a large, substance-naïve sample.

Method: We included ABCD participants with valid Monetary Incentive Delay task fMRI Baseline data and parent substance use history at project baseline from Data Release 2.0 (N = 10,622). Parent-history-positive (PH+) participants had one or both biological parents with a history of two+problems with alcohol (n = 741; PH+A) and/or other drugs (n = 638; PH+D). Of participants who were parent-history-negative (PH-) for alcohol and/or drugs, a stratified random sample based on six sociodemographic variables was created and matched to the PH+group (PH-A n = 699; PH-D n = 615). The contrast of interest was anticipation of a large reward vs. neutral response.

Results: PH+A youth had more activation in the right NAcc during large reward anticipation than PH-A. PH+D youth showed enhanced left putamen activation during large reward anticipation than PH-D youth. Bayesian hypothesis testing showed moderate evidence (BF > 3) in favor of the null hypothesis.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that pre-adolescents whose biological parents had a history of substance-related problems show small differences in reward processing compared to their PH- peers.

Keywords: ABCD Study; Monetary Incentive Delay task; Reward anticipation; Substance use history; fMRI.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) Task Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc; top) and Putamen (Pu) activation: Anticipation of Large Rewards versus Neutral Response. An analysis of variance showed more right NAcc activation among PH+A subjects compared to their PH-A peers.
Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) Task Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc; top) and Putamen (Pu) activation: Anticipation of Large Rewards versus Neutral Response. An analysis of variance showed more right NAcc activation among PH+A subjects compared to their PH-A peers.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) Task Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc; top) and Putamen (Pu) activation: Anticipation of Large Rewards versus Neutral Response. An analysis of variance showed enhanced left Pu activation among PH+D youth relative to PH-D youth.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. (n.d.). ABCD Protocol Summary Baseline. https://abcdstudy.org/images/Protocol-Brochure-Baseline.pdf
    1. Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. (n.d.). Protocols. https://abcdstudy.org/scientists/protocols/
    1. Andrews MM, Meda SA, Thomas AD, Potenza MN, Krystal JH, Worhunsky P, Stevens MC, O’Malley S, Book GA, Reynolds B, & Pearlson GD (2011). Individuals family history positive for alcoholism show fMRI differences in reward sensitivity that are related to impulsivity factors. Biological Psychiatry, 69(7), 675–683. 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.09.049 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bjork JM, Knutson B, & Hommer DW (2008). Incentive-elicited striatal activation in adolescent children of alcoholics. Addiction, 103(8), 1308–1319. 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2008.02250.x - DOI - PubMed
    1. Casey BJ, Cannonier T, Conley MI, Cohen AO, Barch DM, Heitzeg MM, Soules ME, Teslovich T, Dellarco DV, Garavan H, Orr CA, Wager TD, Banich M T., Speer NK, Sutherland MT, Riedel MC, Dick AS, Bjork JM, Thomas KM, … ABCD Imaging Acquisition Workgroup. (2018). The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study: Imaging acquisition across 21 sites. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 32, 43–54. 10.1016/j.dcn.2018.03.001 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Publication types