Psychostimulant drugs including amphetamines have been employed for a wide range of applications across diverse populations. These include prescription medications for conditions such as ADHD and obesity, illicit street variants, and, recently, an increasing misuse of pharmaceuticals as focus and study aids in high school and college populations. Despite their popularity, there remains limited information on how these substances affect the healthy human brain, modify physiological and psychological behavior, and interact with both internal traits and external stimuli. Furthermore, there exists an impetus to examine individual differences contributing to how these drugs may be processed, which could better inform the prescription of psychostimulants and the treatment of their misuse and addiction. In this dissertation, I explored how common serotonergic and dopaminergic gene polymorphisms interact with drug-induced neural activity and response to stakes-based decision-making, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By investigating genes directly involved with the molecular mechanisms of amphetamine-type drugs, this approach elucidated both neural networks underlying drug effects and contributing factors to previously documented heterogeneity in drug response and related behavior.
Nitenson, Adam Zachary,
"Genetic Contributions to Heterogeneous Subjective and Neural Response to Psychostimulants"
(2018).
Neuroscience Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/axsg-6z53
