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Home Industry News Brain scans ‘can help to identify teens at risk of drug abuse problems’

Brain scans ‘can help to identify teens at risk of drug abuse problems’

22nd February 2017

New research has indicated that brain scans could be used to identify adolescents who may be at risk of developing drug problems in later life.

Carried out by Stanford University, the research assessed data from 144 European adolescents who scored high on a test determining their tendency towards novelty seeking – the personality traits that might indicate a teenager is at risk for drug or alcohol abuse.

For this study, participants were asked to play a simple videogame for points that can eventually be converted into money, while monitoring how their the reward centres of their brains responded using MRI scans.

It was shown that researchers were able to correctly predict whether youngsters would go on to abuse drugs in around two-thirds of cases based on how their brains responded to anticipating rewards.

This is a substantial improvement over current behavioural and personality measures, which are only able to correctly distinguish future drug abusers from other novelty-seeking 14-year-olds about 55 percent of the time.

Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, said: "This is just a first step toward something more useful. Ultimately the goal – and maybe this is pie in the sky – is to do clinical diagnosis on individual patients."

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