Socio-moral processing in female stimulant abuse and psychopathy

The Mind Research Network, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

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Abstract

There continues to be great interest and relevance to public health with regard to understanding the neurobiological systems that underlie the comorbidity of substance use disorders and other psychiatric conditions. In the previous funding period, we focused our efforts upon characterizing the neural circuitry underlying moral decision making in incarcerated adult males with varying levels of two frequently cooccurring conditions: stimulant abuse and psychopathy. Here we propose to extend this work to incarcerated adult females, to examine longitudinal outcomes, and to apply state-of-the-art image analyses to our predictive models. Studies published by our research team and others have demonstrated sex/gender 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. We have also discovered substantial sex differences in regional gray matter density (n>500). Collectively, these sex differences could have significant implications for substance abuse treatment strategies and biomarkers of treatment prediction and outcome in males and females. We will implement the research strategy with a large incarcerated female population by deploying a unique mobile MRI scanner to the regional prison facility. Female participants will be stratified by their 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. We will compare the results to those we obtained in the prior funding period with our male incarcerated sample (n>300). We will also examine functional network and dynamic network connectivity in females using a new multiband EPI pulse sequence, and collect longitudinal outcomes after release to the community and test behavioral/ 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 the recent call by NIDA for projects aimed at examining male-female differences, and effects specific to females, to improve our understanding of the nature and etiology of drug abuse