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.

童年虐待（childhood maltreatment）与诸多不良情感及认知后果密切相关，具体包括情绪加工、抑制与注意功能受损。然而，现有针对童年虐待的功能磁共振成像（functional magnetic resonance imaging，fMRI）研究多围绕情绪加工维度展开，极少有研究探讨认知功能的神经功能底物，且尚未有研究关注注意功能的相关机制。本研究纳入21例存在童年虐待史、未接受过药物治疗且无药物滥用史的青年群体，同时设置19例匹配精神诊断的精神疾病对照组与27例健康对照组，通过纳入精神共病因素控制混杂影响，采用负荷逐步递增的参数化持续注意任务，探究重度童年虐待与任务态脑激活模式之间的关联。行为学结果显示，经历过童年虐待的被试在任务中表现出更多漏报错误，且漏报错误数量与虐待时长呈正向趋势相关。神经影像学结果表明，仅在最具挑战性的注意负荷条件下，有童年虐待史的被试（而非精神疾病对照组）在左侧额下回、背外侧前额叶皮层、脑岛及颞叶等典型注意脑区的激活水平较健康对照组显著降低。本研究首次证实，重度童年虐待与腹侧额-颞叶核心持续注意脑区的神经功能异常存在关联。本研究结果为阐明虐待相关的持续注意神经功能异常迈出了关键第一步，或可为童年虐待受害者的有效治疗手段开发提供重要参考。