California Health Sciences University - College of Osteopathic Medicine Clovis, California
Background and Hypothesis: Total grey matter volume (GMV) is low in patients with conduct disorder (CD), and abnormal changes in specific areas for socioemotional stimuli processing were found. Psychiatric diagnoses of various behavioral disorders have been increasingly supplemented with structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) to analyze and measure architectural changes within the brain; therefore, sMRI has the potential to serve as a radiomarker for CD diagnosis. This systematic review demonstrates how CD has been linked to radiographic imaging of grey matter regions involved in socioemotional stimuli processing found in female and male adolescents.
Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted in electronic databases, including PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar. Studies published between June 2011 and February 2023 that used sMRI to investigate socioemotional-related grey matter depletion in CD were included. The search terms included "Conduct Disorder," "MRI," and "grey matter." Studies of CD patients who expressed obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, and bipolar disorder were excluded. The inclusion criteria were limited to human studies published in English. A total of 20 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review.
Results: Adolescents with CD were shown to have a strong association with decreased total GMV as seen in sMRI scans. Specifically, the total GMV was reduced in the anterior cingulate gyrus, insula, parahippocampal gyrus, right ventral striatum, and orbitofrontal cortex. Depletion of GMV in the temporal lobe, frontal lobe, parietal lobe, and cerebellum posterior lobe was also identified. The effects on the amygdala, however, presented conflicting discoveries in size changes due to CD, and thus require additional investigation.
Conclusion: We found a suggestive association between conduct disorder and consistent radiographic findings of reduced grey matter involved in emotion and behavioral processing through sMRI scans as observed in various studies and evaluated their findings. These radiographic discoveries may present a more tangible method to identify CD while offering the potential for medical imaging to be used as a diagnostic criterion in psychiatric illnesses in the future. More research is needed to fully comprehend the trends seen in sMRI data in conjunction with CD, and further investigation of the potential for neuroimaging to be used as a tool to understand sociobehavioral disorders is desired.
Acknowledgement of Research Study Sponsors and IRB: We would like to thank California Health Sciences University for sponsoring our project and providing the necessary resources and funding. IRB was reviewed and exempt.
