Section on Developmental Neurogenomics, Human Genetics Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Computational Brain Anatomy (CoBrA) Laboratory, Cerebral Imaging Centre, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Neuroimage Clin. 2021;31:102771. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2021.102771. Epub 2021 Jul 26.
Men and women tend to differ in the age of first alcohol consumption, transition into disordered drinking, and the prevalence of alcohol use disorder. Here, we use a unique longitudinal dataset to test for potentially predispositonal sex-biases in brain organization prior to initial alcohol exposure. Our study combines measures of subcortical morphometry gathered in alcohol naive individuals during childhood (mean age: 9.43 years, SD = 2.06) with self-report measures of alcohol use in the same individuals an average of 17 years later (N = 81, 46 males, 35 females). We observe that pediatric amygdala and hippocampus volume both show sex-biased relationships with adult drinking. Specifically, females show a stronger association between subcortical volumetric reductions in childhood and peak drinking in adulthood as compared to males. Detailed analysis of subcortical shape localizes these effects to the rostro-medial hippocampus and basolateral amygdala subnuclei. In contrast, we did not observe sex-specific associations between striatal anatomy and peak alcohol consumption. These results are consistent with a model in which organization of the amygdala and hippocampus in childhood is more relevant for subsequent patterns of peak alcohol use in females as compared to males. Differential neuroanatomical precursors of alcohol use in males and females could provide a potential developmental basis for well recognized sex-differences in alcohol use behaviors.. Thus, our findings not only indicate that brain correlates of human alcohol consumption are manifest long before alcohol initiation, but that some of these correlates are not equivalent between males and females.
男性和女性在首次饮酒年龄、过渡到饮酒障碍以及酒精使用障碍的流行程度上存在差异。在这里，我们使用独特的纵向数据集来测试在首次接触酒精之前大脑组织中可能存在的性别偏倚。我们的研究结合了在儿童时期（平均年龄：9.43 岁，标准差=2.06）未接触酒精的个体中收集的皮质下形态测量值，以及在同一个体中平均 17 年后的酒精使用自我报告测量值（N=81，46 名男性，35 名女性）。我们观察到，儿童时期的杏仁核和海马体体积都与成人饮酒量呈性别偏倚关系。具体来说，与男性相比，女性在儿童时期皮质下体积减少与成年期饮酒高峰期之间的相关性更强。对皮质下形状的详细分析将这些效应定位到了海马体的头侧-中侧和杏仁核的基底外侧亚核。相比之下，我们没有观察到纹状体解剖结构与饮酒高峰期之间存在性别特异性关联。这些结果与以下模型一致，即儿童时期杏仁核和海马体的组织在女性中与随后的饮酒高峰期模式的相关性更强，而不是男性。男性和女性饮酒行为的不同神经解剖学前体可能为众所周知的性别差异提供了潜在的发育基础。因此，我们的发现不仅表明人类饮酒的大脑相关性在开始饮酒之前很早就表现出来，而且这些相关性中的一些在男性和女性之间并不相同。
