Tiago Maia, Ph.D.

Fellow in Child & Adolescent ADHD

Project Details

PROJECT TITLE

Integrated Neurocomputational Modeling and Functional Imaging of Children with ADHD

PROJECT SUMMARY

Difficulties with attention are one of the cardinal symptoms of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Stimulants are often effective in improving attention in patients with ADHD, but their mechanism of action remains poorly understood. Whereas much is known about the synaptic effects of stimulants, little is known about how such effects translate into differences in activity in the brain circuits that support attention. This project will address this question using a combination of computational modeling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

We have been scanning children with ADHD while they perform attentional tasks both on and off stimulants. This allows us to determine the effects of stimulants on the brain activity of children with ADHD. In this project, we will seek to understand how the synaptic effects of stimulants translate into the changes in activity that we have been observing in brain circuits that support attention. We will do this by building a computational model of these circuits that includes a mathematical formulation of the synaptic effects of stimulants. Computational models are extremely powerful to understand how changes in one characteristic of a circuit – e.g., due to the synaptic effects of stimulants – lead to systems-level changes in the activity of the circuit. To ensure the validity of the model, we will test its predictions against the fMRI data we have been collecting.

By improving our mechanistic understanding of the effects of stimulants on the circuits that support attention, this project may ultimately lead to better treatments for inattention.

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