American researchers have discovered which part of the brain depends on our ability to control our impulses, which could predict in adolescence possible mental health problems in adulthood.
Adolescence is a period of transition between the end of childhood and the transition to adulthood, punctuated by hormonal, psychological and physical upheavals. During this period, the anatomy of the brain evolves towards maturation and generates many cognitive and behavioral changes.
Researchers from the Lifespan Brain Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) studied the activity of neural circuits underlying self-control during adolescence, in particular to establish if it were possible to predict and anticipate possible mental health problems in adulthood. Their study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Better understand to anticipate
“By observing brain development during childhood and adolescence, we better understand how it supports executive function and self-control in healthy children and those with more fragile mental health,” explains the study’s lead author, Theodore Satterthwaite, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Penn. Executive functions are the brain capacities that allow us to adapt and get used to new situations. Examples: correcting an error, moving from one task to another, managing an unforeseen event, anticipating, acting logically, pursuing an objective, keeping a schedule, etc.
“Since abnormalities in the development of brain connectivity and deficits in executive function are often linked to the emergence of mental illness in young people, our results may help identify biomarkers of brain development that predict cognitive and clinical outcomes later in life”. In other words, by observing the development of neural connections and the evolution of an adolescent’s executive functions, researchers could predict whether or not he will be mentally healthy as an adult.
Impulse control better understood
To conduct this study, the researchers recruited 727 participants between the ages of 8 and 23. Using a very sophisticated imaging technique called “multimodal neuroimaging”, the researchers noted that “executive functions such as impulse control — which can be particularly difficult to manage in children and adolescents — depend in part on the structure-function development in complex brain areas like the prefrontal cortex.”
In August 2019, dAmerican researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have demonstrated that MRIs made it possible to see that a person at risk of suffering from psychoses, such as schizophrenia for example, had dysfunctions in a specific area of the brain.
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