Scientists have found a number of previously unknown networks in the human brain, which go a long way towards explaining why some teens are more capable to trying and even to start using drugs and alcohol, but others don’t. The largest imaging investigation of the teenagers brain involved 1,896 14-year-olds. Robert Whelan and Hugh Garavan of the University of Vermont, along with a large group of international colleagues, reported that the differences in these networks had strong signed that some teens are at higher risk for drug and alcohol experimentation only because their brains work in a different way, making them more nervous.
This new discovery helps to give an answer a long-standing chicken-or-egg question about whether brain exemplar come before drug use-or are caused by it.
“The distinction in these networks seem to introduce drug use,” declared Garavan, Whelan’s colleague in UVM’s psychiatry department, who also served as the main investigator of the Irish component of a large European study project, named IMAGEN, that gathered the facts about the teens in the new research.
In a key finding, decreased activity in a network containing the “orbito frontal cortex” is linked with experimentation with alcohol, cigs and even illicit drugs in early of their adolescence.
The scientists were also observed that other recently discovered networks are connected with the symptoms of attention-lack hyperactivity disorder. These ADHD networks are different from those associated with early drug use.