Brain alterations in children/adolescents with ADHD revisited: A neuroimaging meta-analysis of 96 structural and functional studies

Abstract

The findings of neuroimaging studies in children/adolescents with ADHD, and even those of previous meta-analyses, are divergent. Here, Activation Likelihood Estimation meta-analysis, following the current best-practice guidelines, was conducted. We searched multiple databases and traced the references up to June 2018. Then, we extracted the reported coordinates reflecting group comparison between ADHD and healthy subjects from 96 eligible studies, containing 1914 unique participants. The analysis of pooled structural and functional, sub-analyses restricted to modality, and in-/decreased contrast did not yield any significant findings. However, further sub-analyses in the task-fMRI experiments (neutral stimuli only) led to aberrant activity in the left pallidum/putamen and decreased activity (male subjects only) in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The overall findings indicate a lack of regional convergence in children/adolescents with ADHD, which might be due to heterogeneous clinical populations, various experimental design, preprocessing, statistical procedures in individual publications. Our results highlight the need for further high-powered investigations, but may also indicate ADHD pathophysiology might rest in network interactions rather than just regional abnormality.

A lack of consistent brain alterations in insomnia disorder: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis

“…Of note, inconsistency across neuroimaging studies is not limited to ID, and has e.g. also been observed in depression and attentiondeficit/hyperactivity symptoms (68,86). Whereas the current findings only summarize the studies on people with a diagnosis of insomnia, it could prove useful to run a similar analysis on the more extensive literature on brain correlates of insomnia complaints.…”

Practical recommendations to conduct a neuroimaging meta‐analysis for neuropsychiatric disorders

“…Neuroimaging meta‐analysis including CBMA has been widely used in various neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression (Kaiser, Andrews‐Hanna, Wager, & Pizzagalli, ; Lai, ; Muller et al, ; Sacher et al, ), bipolar disorder (Wang et al, ; Wegbreit et al, ), schizophrenia (Brandl et al, ; Jardri, Pouchet, Pins, & Thomas, ; Xiao, Zhang, Lui, Yao, & Gong, ), Alzheimer's disease (Ferreira, Diniz, Forlenza, Busatto, & Zanetti, ; Schroeter, Stein, Maslowski, & Neumann, ; Wang et al, ), Parkinson's disease (Herz, Eickhoff, Lokkegaard, & Siebner, ; Tahmasian et al, ; Wang, Zhang, Zang, & Wu, ), post‐traumatic stress disorder(Kuhn & Gallinat, ; Ramage et al, ; Wang et al, ), sleep disorders (Javaheipour et al, ; Shi et al, ; Tahmasian et al, ; Tahmasian et al, ), as well as neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism (Dickstein et al, ; Nickl‐Jockschat et al, ) and attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Cortese et al, ; Cortese et al, ; Hart, Radua, Mataix‐Cols, & Rubia, ; Hart, Radua, Nakao, Mataix‐Cols, & Rubia, ; Samea et al, ).…”

“…Importantly, the contribution of the individual studies to the observed significant convergent cluster and the clear anatomical It is worthy to mention that neuroimaging meta-analyses often yield nonsignificant convergent findings, as reported in imaginggenetic studies, as well as depression, insomnia disorder, and ADHD (Muller et al, 2017;Nickl-Jockschat, Janouschek, Eickhoff, & Eickhoff, 2015;Samea et al, 2019;Tahmasian et al, 2018b). The reasons of such negative findings include heterogeneity in the recruited clinical populations, experimental designs, and statistical inference procedures.…”

Functional brain alterations in acute sleep deprivation: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis

“…In this approach, the spatial convergence could be described as a consistent functional or structural disturbance (32). This has been used in various neuropsychiatric conditions (34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40). In order to identify consistent brain regions related to SD across different experiments, the revised ALE algorithm implemented in MATLAB is utilized here (18).…”