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Researchers ‘See’ Vulnerability to Gaming Addiction in the Adolescent Brain

Monday, December 9, 2024

Playing video games is a rite of passage for many adolescents, but for some, it could also be the first step to a gaming addiction

“A number one concern for parents of children and teenagers is how much screen time and how much gaming is enough gaming and how to figure out where to draw the line,” said John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and co-author of a study out today in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions that discovered a key marker in the brain of teens who develop gaming addiction symptoms. “These data begin to give us some answers.”

Researchers looked at data collected from 6,143 identified video game users ages 10-15 over four years. In the first year, researchers took brain scans using an fMRI as participants completed the task of pushing a button fast enough to receive a $5 reward. Researchers subsequently had the same participants answer Video Game Addiction Questionnaires over the next three years. They found that the participants with more symptoms of gaming addiction over time showed lower brain activity in the region involved in decision-making and reward processing during the initial brain scan taken four years earlier. Previous research in adults has provided similar insight, showing that this blunted response to reward anticipation is associated with higher symptoms of gaming addiction and suggests that reduced sensitivity to rewards, in particular non-gaming rewards, may play a role in problematic gaming.

“Gaming itself is not unhealthy, but there is a line, and our study clearly shows that some people are more susceptible to symptoms of gaming addiction than others,” said Daniel Lopez, PhD (’23), a postdoctoral fellow at the Developmental Brain Imaging Lab at Oregon Health & Science University and first author of the study. “I think for parents, that's really key because you could restrict children entirely from gaming, but that's going to be really, really difficult and crucial to their development as well as their social development. But we want to know the right balance between healthy gaming and unhealthy gaming, and this research starts to point us in the direction of the neural markers we can use to help us identify who might be at risk of unhealthy gaming behaviors.”

Neuroimaging study reveals structural brain differences in children with autism - MSN News

Thursday, October 10, 2024

There is new evidence that the cells responsible for communication in the brain may be structured differently in children with autism. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester discovered that in some areas of the brain neuron density varies in children with autism when compared to the general population.

“We are at the beginning of understanding the true impact that the extraordinary data collected by the ABCD Study will have on the health of our children,” says John Foxe, the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Chair in Neuroscience and the director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience and the Golisano Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Institute. “It is truly transforming what we know about brain development as we follow this group of children from childhood into early adulthood.”

Research finds neurons look different in children with autism

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Neuronal measurements may provide new insight into diagnosis & therapeutic interventions for autism

There is new evidence that the cells responsible for communication in the brain may be structured differently in children with autism. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester discovered that in some areas of the brain neuron density varies in children with autism when compared to the general population.

“We've spent many years describing the larger characteristics of brain regions, such as thickness, volume, and curvature,” said Zachary Christensen, MD/PhD candidate at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and first author of the paper out today in Autism Research. “However, newer techniques in the field of neuroimaging for characterizing cells using MRI, unveil new levels of complexity throughout development.”

Imaging provides new insight into brain development

Researchers used brain imaging data collected from more than 11,000 children ages 9-11. They compared the imaging of the 142 children in that group with autism, to the general population and found there was lower neuron density in regions of the cerebral cortex. Some of these regions of the brain are responsible for tasks like memory, learning, reasoning, and problem-solving. In contrast, the researchers also found other brain regions, such as the amygdala—an area responsible for emotions—that showed increased neuron density. In addition to comparing the scans of children with autism to those of children without any neurodevelopmental diagnosis, they also compared the children with autism to a large group of children diagnosed with common psychiatric disorders like ADHD and anxiety. The results were the same, suggesting that these differences are specific to Autism.

“People with a diagnosis of autism often have other things they have to deal with, such as anxiety, depression, and ADHD. But these findings mean we now have a new set of measurements that have shown unique promise in characterizing individuals with autism,” Christensen said. “If characterizing unique deviations in neuron structure in those with autism can be done reliably and with relative ease, that opens a lot of opportunities to characterize how autism develops, and these measures may be used to identify individuals with autism that could benefit from more specific therapeutic interventions.”

John Foxe spoke on Fairport Central School District making changes to school day schedule

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, spoke to WHAM (Sept. 18) about Fairport School District altering start times for middle and high schoolers in 2026. "We have clear evidence from neurosciences that it’s at night when you’re sleeping that your memory systems consolidate the information you took in during the day," said Foxe. "What we will see is less falling asleep, less distraction, better behavior, more learning and ability to take on more material.”

Researchers find possible neuromarker for ‘juvenile-onset’ Batten disease

Monday, January 8, 2024

Early symptoms can be subtle. A child’s personality and behavior may change, and clumsiness or stumbling develops between the ages of five and ten. Over time, cognitive impairment sets in, seizures emerge or worsen, vision loss begins, and motor skills decline. This is the course of Batten disease, a progressive inherited disorder of the nervous system that results from mutations to the CLN3 gene.

“It is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder of childhood,” said John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience and co-director of the University of Rochester Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (UR-IDDRC), “and while it is very rare, it is important to study and understand because it could inform what we know and how we treat it and other related rare diseases.”

In a new study, out today in the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Foxe and a team of researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center may be closer to that goal of understanding. The paper describes how they measured changes in brain function of participants with CLN3 disease, also known as 'juvenile-onset' Batten disease. Researchers found that the functioning of the auditory sensory memory system—the brain system required for short-term memory recall—appears to decrease as the disease progresses. They revealed this by utilizing electroencephalographic recordings (EEG) to measure the brain activity of participants with and without Batten disease as they passively listened to simple auditory beeps. The participants simultaneously watched a video of their favorite movie while the brain responses to these beeps were being measured. In the participants with Batten disease, the EEG revealed a decline in the response from the auditory sensory memory system as the disease progressed. There were no significant changes among the other participants. This finding suggests that this easy-to-measure brain process may be a target or biomarker in measuring treatment outcomes in clinical trials.

“We needed to find a task that did not require explicit engagement or attention, and this is one of those kinds of tasks,” Foxe said. “The brain produces the signal that we're looking at, regardless of whether the participant is paying attention to the beeps or not. It is an objective method that provides new insight into the brain function of a population with varying communication abilities.”