Reduced gray matter volume in male adolescent violent offenders

Ying-Dong Zhang; Jian-Song Zhou; Feng-Mei Lu; Xiao-Ping Wang

doi:10.7717/peerj.7349

Reduced gray matter volume in male adolescent violent offenders

PeerJ. 2019 Sep 3:7:e7349. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7349. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Ying-Dong Zhang^{1

2}, Jian-Song Zhou^{1

2}, Feng-Mei Lu^{3

4}, Xiao-Ping Wang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health Institute of the Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
² National Clinical Research Center on Mental Disorders & National Technology Institute on Mental Disorders, Hunan Key Laboratory of Psychiatry and Mental Health, Changsha, Hunan, China.
³ The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
⁴ School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Cichuan, China.

Abstract

Background: Previous studies reported that reduced gray matter volume (GMV) was associated with violent-related behaviors. However, the previous studies were conducted on adults and no study has studied the association between GMV and violent behaviors on adolescents. The purpose of the study was to investigate GMV's effects in adolescent violent offenders based on a Chinese Han population, which can address the problem of possible confounding factors in adult studies.

Methods: We recruited 30 male adolescent violent offenders and 29 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs). Differences in both whole-brain and GMV were evaluated using voxel-based morphometry (VBM). We assessed the accuracy of VBM using the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and discriminant analysis.

Results: Compared with HCs, the male adolescent offenders showed significantly reduced GMV in five cortical and subcortical brain regions, including the olfactory cortex, amygdala, middle temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe in the left hemisphere, as well as the right superior temporal gyrus. Both ROC curve and discriminate analyses showed that these regions had relatively high sensitivities (58.6%-89.7%) and specificities (58.1%-74.2%) with 76.7% classification accuracy.

Conclusions: Our results indicated that reduced volume in the frontal-temporal-parietal-subcortical circuit may be closely related to violent behaviors in male adolescents, which might be an important biomarker for detecting violent behaviors in male adolescents.

Keywords: Brain structural abnormalities; Discriminate analyses; ROC; VBM; Violence.

Grants and funding

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 30800368, 81371500, 81571341 and 81501637), and the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No. 13YJC190033). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.