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The objective of this study is to examine the effects of genetic variability in the dopamine signaling pathway on metric measures of impulsivity. Our hypothesis is that increased dopamine levels or conversion of dopamine to intracellular signals, brought about by specific variants of genes in this pathway, will increase impulsivity in our behavioral tasks. We will examine variability by recruiting up to 400 ethnically and racially diverse healthy adult male and female volunteers aged 18 to 55. We will carry out genotyping, behavioral testing and functional magnetic resonance imaging on this group. We will initially recruit a large pool of subjects for behavioral testing and genotyping. Behavioral tests will include various laboratory tasks related to impulsivity. We have recently developed a series of tasks that we have used in a group of Parkinson s patients with impulsive/compulsive behaviors (PD+ICBs). Several tasks have shown large group effects between Parkinson s patients with and without ICBs (PD +/- ICBs). We will focus on those tasks in the present study. Specific examples include information sampling tasks and measures of novelty preference. If genetic effects on behavior in the large sample are found, we will ask a subset of the original sample to return for fMRI testing. The subset will be selected to allow us to examine the neural circuits that operate differently as a function of genotype. In other words, they will be selected on the basis of their genotype. The outcome measure in this case will be differences in brain activity as a function of genotype, during performance of our behavioral task.
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Inclusion and exclusion criteria
Subjects will be eligible for this study if they:
EXCLUSION CRITERIA:
Subjects will not be eligible for this study if they:
In addition to the above, additional exclusion criteria apply for all MRI studies:
78 participants in 1 patient group
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Data sourced from clinicaltrials.gov
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