A Voxel Based Morphometry MRI Study Of Altered Gray Matter Volume And The Preliminary Application Of 3D-ASL In Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Children

Objective:To investigate the altered volume of gray matter and preliminary evaluation of aberrant cerebral perfusion in children attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.Materials and Methods: In the first part of this research, 18 ADHD and 15 healthy children were enrolled,consent forms were obtained prior to the study. These two groups were well-matched to each other with reference to age, gender, handness and intelligence quotient, respectively. 3D-T1 BRAVO scanning was performed and voxel-based morphometry analysis was used to assess the variation of whole-brain gray matter volume. In addition, 14 ADHD and 15 healthy children were enrolled as the second part of this study. Then 3D-ASL scanning was performed.The ASL data were transferred to an off-line workstation(General Elertric,Advantage workstation,edtion 4.5). CBF-map was constructed automatically from ASL data by the workstation's functool software. ROIs were placed in bilateral caudate necleus head, globus pallidus, putamen, thalamus and splenium of corpus callosum to detect the perfusion differences between these two groups. Furthermore, the relationships between ASL-CBF and age in the selected ROIs were analyzed using Pearson's correlation analysis.Results: The gray matter volume of the right cerebellum, left superior temporal gyrus, left lingualisgyrus, right thalamus and left cuneus in ADHD group was significantly lower than that in the control group. The CBF of the bilateral caudate necleus head, bilateral thalamus and left globuspallidus in ADHD group was significantly elevated compared to that in the control group. The CBF of bilateral caudate nucleus head andright thalamus in control group was positively correlated with age(R=0.4767, 0.4671, 0.299, respectively; p?0.05), while there were no significant correlation between CBF and age in ADHD group.Conclusion:The gray matter volume of ADHD children is decreased in different cerebral regions, meanwhile, the perfusion of striatum and thalamus is elevated, and these alterations suggest malfunction of advanced cognitive neural circuits. Furthermore, the correlation between CBF and age in several cerebral regions indicate the aberrant trajectory of ADHD children, which is helpful for further detecting the neural pathology of ADHD.