"Because these discrepancies could reflect differences in medication or drug-abuse histories among subjects, we designed the current study to investigate dopamine transporter levels in ADHD subjects and control subjects while excluding these potentially confounding factors," Wang said.
The researchers measured dopamine transporter levels in 20 adult ADHD subjects who had never received medication, never abused drugs (except nicotine), and had no past or present history of mental or neurological disease or other medical conditions that could affect cerebral function. They also asked subjects to respond to a questionnaire to gauge levels of inattention. The scientists ran the same tests in 25 healthy control subjects with the same exclusion criteria.
To measure dopamine transporter levels, each subject was given an injection of a radiotracer (a radioactively labeled chemical) designed to bind to dopamine transporters while lying in a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. The PET camera picks up the radioactive signal from the tracer to precisely measure the level of dopamine transporters.
The PET scans revealed that ADHD subjects had significantly fewer dopamine transporters than control subjects in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the ventral striatum that is one of the main reward centers in the brain. In a dorsal striatum region known as the putamen, which plays an important role in habits and is also involved with attention, dopamine transporter levels did not differ between the two groups.
In both groups, levels of dopamine transporters in the putamen were positively associated with scores of inattention on the sel
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Source:DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory