Original ArticleGenetic Variation in Serotonin Transporter Alters Resting Brain Function in Healthy Individuals
Section snippets
Participants
From a sample of 276 screened, healthy subjects, we recruited 30 subjects for the scanning (14 female subjects; all Caucasian; mean age 20.3 years, range 18 to 29 years). All subjects were neurologically intact with no reported history of head trauma and no current psychiatric diagnosis. Written informed consent was obtained in accordance with the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pennsylvania. Four subjects were excluded from the study due to problems in perfusion quantification.
Results
Study demographics and the scores of behavioral measurements of 26 subjects are listed in Table 1. No significant differences were observed between the two genotype groups (all p’s > .2). The self-reported mood ratings of anxiety (61.2 for l/l group vs. 72.3 for s/s group) and sadness (71.9 for l/l group vs. 81.2 for s/s group) also showed no significant differences between the two groups (both p’s > .1).
The quantitative resting CBF images averaged from the s/s and l/l groups are shown in
Discussion
Genomic neuroimaging studies provide emerging methods to understand human emotion and behavior. The combination of neuroimaging and genetic approaches will facilitate investigations of genotypes and the associated brain mechanisms that underlie the vulnerability to mood disorders (Drevets 2000, Hariri et al 2006, Hariri and Holmes 2006, Wurtman 2005). In line with this direction, the present study integrated perfusion-based functional MRI with genomic analysis to quantify and compare the
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