Citation

Brazil IA, Buades-Rotger M. Lancet Psychiatry 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Department of Neurology and Institute of Psychology II, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30035-3

PMID

32078821

Abstract

Despite remarkable progress in the past three decades, the aetiology of antisocial behaviour remains elusive. Using the developmental taxonomy theory of antisocial behaviour as a starting point, Christina Carlisi and colleagues1 have made an important contribution by identifying structural brain correlates of antisocial behaviour that could be used to differentiate among individuals with life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour, those with adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour, and non-antisocial controls. Specifically, the authors report a brain-wide reduction of cortical surface area in individuals with life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour relative to participants with adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour (standardised β=–0·17 [95% CI −0·26 to −0·07], p=0·0008) and controls (standardised β=–0·18 [95% CI −0·24 to −0·11], p<0·0001). Additionally, both life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour were linked to different patterns of cortical thinning in a more restricted set of paralimbic regions relative to non-antisocial controls (life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour vs controls standardised β=–0·10 [95% CI −0·19 to −0·02], p=0·020; adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour vs controls standardised β=–0·08 [95% CI −0·16 to 0·00], p=0·039). These findings offer a considerable advance to the field and also provide an opportunity to reflect on unresolved issues concerning the use of neurobiological measures to capture and explain individual variability in antisocial behaviour. Although many challenges need to be overcome before the latter can be achieved, we restrict our focus to the issue of mapping brain structure onto function, and the application of the findings to the assessment of individuals with antisocial behaviour.

Neuroimaging has become an important tool for studying the brain correlates of antisocial behaviour. There is great interest not only in understanding how alterations in brain structure can be used to characterise individuals with antisocial behaviour, but also in how disturbances in brain functioning relate to antisocial behaviour ...

Language: en