Data from: Neurofunctional abnormalities during sustained attention in severe childhood abuse

Childhood maltreatment is associated with adverse affective and cognitive
consequences including impaired emotion processing, inhibition and
attention. However, the majority of functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) studies in childhood maltreatment have examined emotion processing,
while very few studies have tested the neurofunctional substrates of
cognitive functions and none of attention. This study investigated the
association between severe childhood abuse and fMRI brain activation
during a parametric sustained attention task with a progressively
increasing load of sustained attention in 21 medication-naïve, drug-free
young people with a history of childhood abuse controlling for psychiatric
comorbidities by including 19 psychiatric controls matched for psychiatric
diagnoses, and 27 healthy controls. Behaviorally, the participants exposed
to childhood abuse showed increased omission errors in the task which
correlated positively trend-wise with the duration of their abuse.
Neurofunctionally, the participants with a history of childhood abuse, but
not the psychiatric controls, displayed significantly reduced activation
relative to the healthy controls during the most challenging attention
condition only in typical attention regions including left inferior and
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, insula and temporal areas. We therefore
show for the first time that severe childhood abuse is associated with
neurofunctional abnormalities in key ventral frontal-temporal sustained
attention regions. The findings represent a first step towards the
delineation of abuse-related neurofunctional abnormalities in sustained
attention, which may help in the development of effective treatments for
victims of childhood abuse.