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July 27, 2022 — Multitasking is not just an office skill. It’s key to functioning as a human, and it involves something calledcognitive flexibility– the ability to smoothly switch between mental processes.UNCscientists conducted a study to image the neural activity analogues to cognitive flexibility and discover differences in the brain activity of children withADHDand those without.
Their findings, in the journalMolecular Psychiatry, could help doctors diagnose children with ADHD and monitor the severity of the condition and treatment effectiveness.
有些人在认知上比其他人更灵活。这只是基因在某些方面的运气，尽管我们可以在意识到自己缺乏灵活性时提高认知灵活性。可以这样想:当我们开始吃晚饭，让洋葱煨着吃，给朋友发短信，在不烧焦洋葱的情况下继续做晚饭，然后在结束晚餐的同时与你的配偶交谈时，我们的认知是灵活的。当我们与朋友、女儿、同事交谈时切换沟通方式，或者当我们创造性地解决问题时，比如当你意识到你没有洋葱做你想要的晚餐，所以你需要一个新的计划时，我们在认知上也是灵活的。
It’s part of ourexecutive function, which includes accessing memories and exhibiting self control. Poor executive function is a hallmark of ADHD in children and adults.
当我们的认知不灵活时，我们就无法专注于某些任务，我们拿起电话，不加思考地浏览社交媒体，在做晚饭时忘记了自己在做什么。在成年人中，尤其是在儿童中，这种认知不灵活会对个人学习和完成任务的能力造成严重破坏。
UNC scientists led by senior authorWeili Lin, PhD, director of the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC), wanted to find out what’s happening throughout the brain when executive function, particularly cognitive flexibility, is off line.
林和他的同事们使用功能性磁共振成像(fMRI)研究了180名被诊断为多动症的儿童和180名正常发育的儿童的神经灵活性。
“We observed significantly decreased neural flexibility in the ADHD group at both the whole brain and sub-network levels,” said Lin, the Dixie Boney Soo Distinguished Professor of Neurological Medicine in the UNC Department of Radiology, “particularly for the default mode network, attention-related networks, executive function-related networks, and primary networks of the brain involved in sensory, motor and visual processing.”
The researchers also found that children with ADHD who received medication exhibited significantly increased neural flexibility compared to children with ADHD who were not taking medication. Children on medication displayed neural flexibility that was not statistically different from the group of traditionally developing children.
Lastly, the researchers found that they could use fMRI to discover neural flexibility differences across entire brain regions between children with ADHA and the traditionally developing children.
“And we were able to predict ADHD severity using clinical measures of symptom severity,” Lin said. “We think our study demonstrate the potential clinical utility of neural flexibility to identify children with ADHD, as well as to monitor treatment responses and the severity of the condition in individual children.”
For more information:https://www.unchealthcare.org/
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