fMRI Evidence of Increasing Disengagement of Sustained Attention-Related Activation with Increasing Age in ADHD Children

Brianne Mohl¹, Dhruman Goradia¹, Dalal Khatib¹, Rachel Dick¹, Caroline Zajac-Benitez¹, Usha Rajan¹, Olivia McGarragle¹, Arthur L. Robin¹, David R. Rosenberg¹, Vaibhav A. Diwadkar¹, Jeffrey A. Stanley¹

ADHD is a serious public health problem. We recently reported age-related biochemical deficits in the prefrontal cortex of ADHD children using in vivo 31P MRS suggesting a lack of a progressive neurodevelopment in ADHD children. However, the functional basis of this effect has not been investigated using fMRI. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether ADHD children would show a similar lack of age-related changes in sustained attention performance. We hypothesized that healthy children will show an age-related increase in the fMRI BOLD response to attention performance, which will be absent in ADHD children.