Reinforcement related behaviors and adolescent alcohol abuse: from localized brain structures to coordinated networks
Résumé
Alcohol is the most prevalent drug used in adolescents, and research on underlying reinforcement mechanisms, such as reward processing, executive control and emotional processing has increased substantially in this age group. We review recent neuroimaging studies related to adolescent alcohol abuse, beginning with region of interest analyses and describing their evolution to the investigation of coordinated network activities. These include examples from the adolescent imaging genetics cohort IMAGEN that led to the identification of distributed and coordinated networks engaged in reinforcement behaviour. We discuss multimodal approaches to characterise and predict alcohol-related symptoms and propose that modeling brain networks, polygenic data and environmental factors using representative statistical models may facilitate the identification of predictors for alcohol use disorders at the individual level.