Adolescence, Puberty, Hormones, and Emotion Regulation: An fMRI Study

The goal of this project is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the degree to which brain regions of adolescents and adults with and without steroid-related endocrine disorders are engaged by tasks involving processing of emotionally salient stimuli. In healthy subjects, based on developmental continuities in the relevant psychological processes, we anticipate considerable similarity across age groups in the topography of brain regions engaged by relevant tasks. However, we hypothesize that developmental differences in cortico-limbic circuits of adolescents and adults will be reflected in patterns of fMRI activation. Specifically, we hypothesize in both adults and adolescents that attention and memory tasks involving the processing of emotionally salient stimuli will engage the amygdala, cingulate gyrus, and association cortex of medial/inferior prefrontal cortex and temporal regions. Nevertheless, height of task-associated activation is hypothesized to differ between adolescents and adults within these regions. Moreover, prior studies distinguish puberty vs. age-related aspects of cognitive development: some aspects of attention or memory development relate to changes in chronological age whereas other aspects, particularly those involving emotional processes, relate to pubertal status. Therefore, we expect eventually to use emotion-evoking fMRI tasks to test hypotheses on the presence of complementary, distinguishable puberty vs. age-related components of brain development. In patients with endocrine disorders, we expect to identify abnormal brain function related to defects in steroidogenesis, including in utero hyperandrogenism and hypocortisolism seen in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), congenital male hyperandrogenism seen in familial male precocious puberty (FMPP), and hypercortisolism seen as Cushing's Syndrome (CS).

To meet these initial goals, we developed and tested a number of attention/emotion tasks in healthy adults and healthy adolescents, tested systematically a few of these tasks in the fMRI, including a face-emotion processing task, an affective picture- processing task, a threat bias task, a dot-probe task, a reward-related task, and tasks probing social processing. We are now entering the 2nd phase of the protocol, in which we are focusing on endocrine disorders, CAH, FMPP and CS. We hypothesize that both face-emotion processing task, an affective picture- processing task will engage the amygdala, cingulate gyrus, and association cortices of the medial/inferior prefrontal and temporal regions differently as a function of time of occurrence, severity, and type of endocrine abnormalities.