CPDD 78th Annual Scientific Meeting Program

SYMPOSIA
Tuesday, June 14
IX:
Translational markers of substance use vulnerability: Receptors, riskprocessing,
and psychopathology
Chairs: Noelle C. Anastasio and Thomas Crowley
Among human children and adolescents, externalizing behaviors, including impulsivity
and risk-taking, predict adolescent and adult substance use disorders. Our
translational studies of substance-naive human and non-human subjects suggest that
aberrant brain function underlies aberrant early behaviors and reflects a neural
vulnerability to substance use disorders. An imbalance in the cortical glutamatergic
system as an underpinning of inherent impulsivity in rodents may be driven by
dysregulation of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor signaling and selective NMDAR
potentiation may reduce high inherent impulsivity. Earlier work demonstrating that in
a risky-decision game, adolescents with substance and conduct problems (SCP) had
widespread brain hypoactivity will be extended to the same game-stimulated neural
activity in numerous brain regions of drug-naïve 9-11 year-olds. Correlation with
participants' parent-rated externalizing scores suggests that aberrant brain function
antedates, and may contribute to, SCP in many adolescents. Data from the IMAGEN
study, a longitudinal cohort of 2200 adolescents who underwent genetic, neuroimaging
and behavioral assessments, will be presented. Correlates of factors of
psychopathology within a hierarchical structural model associated with psychiatric
conditions, including substance use disorder, will be shown. This panel will emphasize
that a greater understanding of the vulnerability to the development of substance use
disorders requires the cross-talk and contribution of cross-discipline, cross-species
studies.
X: Imaging the male & female addicted brain: Structural and functional
differences and implications for precision medicine
Chairs: Cora Lee Wetherington and Will M. Aklin
The Precision Medicine Initiative was announced by President Obama in the 2015 State
of the Union address, and was subsequently described by Francis Collins & Harold
Varmus (NEJM, 2015) as “prevention and treatment strategies that take individual
variability into account.” Because biological sex is the most fundamental difference
among individuals, studying differences in outcomes between men and women is lowhanging
fruit in achieving precision medicine. Speakers in this symposium will present
sex differences in neuroimaging data that are providing a window on potential targets,
both behavioral and pharmacologic, to enhance precision medicine, from both
prevention and treatment perspectives. A brief review of sexual dimorphism in brain
structure and connectivity in healthy people will precede discussion of sex-specific
differences in cortical and subcortical gray-matter volume and correlated drug use and
behavioral measures in long-term abstinent stimulant users. Data from the PET image
analysis, lp-ntPET, will be shown, which can provide real-time ‘movies’ and
quantification of dopamine release during smoking, and has revealed sex differences
in dopamine release in the ventral striatum and dorsal putamen and its relationships
to mood and reward in smokers. Also presented will be data from males and females
with substance use disorders, with and without trauma histories, comparing their
resting-state functional connectivity, their response to pharmacologic probes of neural
systems, and their response to drug-related cues.