Niche Lab - Neuroimaging In Childhood

ADHD research at NICHE

The ADHD research at NICHE started with the work of Sarah Durston, now head of NICHE. In her PhD thesis (Imaging brain structure and function in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), she included several studies investigating morphological and functional changes in children with ADHD and their unaffected siblings (see Publications on Sarah's page).

After her PhD, Sarah followed up this work with (amongst other funding) two consecutive grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), a VENI in 2003 and a VIDI in 2006. In 2003 she started NICHE, the “neuroimaging in children” lab of the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry of the UMC Utrecht. Now, the MRI-scans Sarah acquired for her PhD form the basis for the extensive NICHE database of over 150 ADHD participants and over 350 scans, one of the largest ADHD data-sets world-wide!

Martijn Mulder (now a NICHE alumnus) continued with the sibling studies. The focus of his PhD project was to investigate familial risk for ADHD in brain functioning. In his studies, Martijn used fMRI to measure brain activity during tasks that probe inhibition, expectation and decision systems in boys with ADHD, their unaffected siblings and control subjects. Martijn finished his project in March 2010 and will defend his PhD thesis on June 3, 2010. For more information on his project and publications: go to Martijn's page.

Janna van Belle also uses fMRI as her main technique. Her project “Neural Correlates of Cognitive Subtypes in ADHD aims to investigate neurobiological markers that are related to specific behaviour of children with ADHD, rather than to the he broad clinical definition of the disorder. In this project, the focus is not restricted to specific structures or regions; the role of (the development of) functional networks in (the development of) ADHD-related behaviour will also be investigated. This project started in 2007 and is expected to end in 2011.

A study related to Janna's work is the Omega-3 study that is being conducted in collaboration with Unilever Research and Development (main investigator: Dienke Bos). The objective of this pilot-project is to investigate cognitive control and associated brain activity in children with and without ADHD after a 16-week supplementation with n-3 fatty acids.

In addition to our functional work in ADHD, NICHE is also the proud owner of one of the largest longitudinal morphological MRI data-sets in the world (structural MRI and DTI). Currently, one project focuses on this large cohort of children with ADHD. The aim of this project (Profiling ADHD: structural MRI and DTI in children with ADHD, main investigator: Patrick de Zeeuw) is to integrate structural neuroimaging, cognitive performance data and genotypic information in ADHD. At this moment (March 2010), the papers on the first results of this extensive project are in preparation.