Scientists have found a better way to predict what personality traits might indicate that a kid is at risk for drug or alcohol abuse.<\/p>\n
The finding of Brian Knutson, Professor of psychology at Stanford University, and Christian Buchel, Professor of medicine at Universitatsklinikum Hamburg Eppendorf, was based on a brain scan data set of 144 European adolescents who scored high on a novelty seeking test.<\/p>\n
The finding was reported this week in Nature Communications, Xinhua news agency reported.<\/p>\n
Psychologists know that kids who score high on tests of novelty seeking are on average a bit more likely to abuse drugs, he said.<\/p>\n
The pair of researchers were out to work on the question: could there be a better test, one both more precise and more individualised, that could tell whether novelty seeking might turn into something more destructive?<\/p>\n
They suspected that a brain-scanning test called the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) Task could be the answer.<\/p>\n
Knutson had developed MID as a way of targeting a part of the brain now known to play a role in mentally processing rewards like money or the high of a drug.<\/p>\n
Kids\u2019 brains in general respond less when anticipating rewards, compared with adults\u2019 brains.<\/p>\n
But that effect is even more pronounced when those kids use drugs, which suggests one of two things: either drugs suppress brain activity, or the suppressed brain activity somehow leads youths to take drugs.<\/p>\n
If it is the latter, according to the researchers, the test could predict future drug use.<\/p>\n
Buchel and colleagues in Europe had already collected data on around 1,000 14-year-olds as they went through MID and had also followed up with each of them two years later to find out if they had become problem drug users.<\/p>\n
For example, if they smoked or drank on a daily basis or ever used harder drugs like heroin.<\/p>\n
Knutson and Buchel then focused their attention on 144 adolescents who had not developed drug problems by age 14 but had scored in the top 25 per cent on a test of novelty seeking.<\/p>\n
Analysing that data, they found they could correctly predict whether youngsters would go on to abuse drugs about two-thirds of the time based on how their brains responded to anticipating rewards.<\/p>\n
This is a substantial improvement over behavioural and personality measures, which correctly distinguished future drug abusers from other novelty-seeking 14-year-olds about 55 per cent of the time, only a little better than chance.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately the goal is to do clinical diagnosis on individual patients\u201d in the hope that doctors could stop drug abuse before it starts, the researcher said.<\/p>\n
IANS<\/strong><\/p>\n Picture source: Alamy Image<\/p>\n Picture used for illustrative purposes alone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scientists have found a better way to predict what personality traits might indicate that a kid is at risk for drug or alcohol abuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29,31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3136,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134\/revisions\/3136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}