Neurocognitive Abnormalities in Stimulant Abuse Among High-Risk Women

Description

There continues to be great interest and public health relevance with regard to understanding the neurobiological systems that underlie the comorbidity of substance use disorders and other psychiatric conditions. In a previous award, efforts were focused upon characterizing the neural circuitry underlying moral decision making in incarcerated men with varying levels of two frequently co-occurring conditions: stimulant abuse and psychopathy. Here this work will be extended to incarcerated women, to examine longitudinal outcomes and apply state-of-the-art network analyses for predictive models. Prior studies have demonstrated sex differences in the degree and expression of psychopathic traits, patterns of stimulant abuse, and moral decision-making. However, the neural circuitry that underlies these sex differences is not well understood. Substantial sex differences in regional gray matter volume and density in extant samples have also been identified. Collectively, sex differences in pathophysiology could have significant implications for treatment strategies and differential biomarkers of treatment prediction and outcome in men and women. The investigators will implement the research strategy with a large incarcerated population by deploying a unique mobile MRI scanner to the regional women’s prison. Participants will be stratified by level of lifetime stimulant (cocaine, amphetamine) use severity and psychopathic traits (high, medium, low) and will undergo anatomical and functional MRI scanning while completing multi-modal (i.e., linguistic and picture) decision-making tasks. Results will be compared to those obtained in a prior award (incarcerated men, n>300). Functional network and dynamic network connectivity will also be examined in women using a new multiband echo planar imaging (EPI) pulse sequence, and longitudinal outcomes after release to the community will be collected to test behavioral and neuropredictive models of relapse and future antisocial behavior. This work is expected to generate a large, robust dataset that characterizes the overlapping and unique aspects of neural circuitry underlying stimulant use and psychopathy in females and males. The proposed research is in line with recent priorities emphasized by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for projects aimed at examining male-female differences, and effects specific to females, to improve understanding of the nature and etiology of drug abuse.