Study Finds Variations in Brain Activity of Children With And Without ADHD

It’s not simply a professional skill to multitask. UNC scientists led by senior author Weili Lin, PhD, director of the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center, wanted to find out what’s happening throughout the brain when executive function, particularly cognitive flexibility, is off line. Lin and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the neural flexibility of 180 children diagnosed with ADHD and 180 typically developing children. “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. 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.