Onze beursstudenten

Dokter Ariadna ALBAJARA SAENZ

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Project

Inhibition Deficits in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A Neuroimaging Investigation.

Project supervisor

Prof. Isabelle Massat, Qualified Researcher at FNRS.
Laboratoire de Neurologie Expérimentale, Hôpital Erasme, Campus Universitaire Erasme, Centre de Recherches en Cognition et Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Prof. Philippe Peigneux, Faculté des Sciences Psychologiques et de l'Education.
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Unité de Recherches en Neuropsychologie et Neuroimagerie Fonctionnelle (UR2NF), Centre de Recherches en Cognition et Neurosciences (CRCN).

Labo of hospitaal waar het project plaatsvindt

This research project is being conducted in close collaboration with different entities.
Patients are recruited in four clinical centres:
- QFCUH (Queen Fabiola Children's University Hospital) in Brussels (Autism centre).
- SUSA Foundation in Mons (Autism centre).
- The Neurology Service at Erasme Hospital (recruitment of ADHD subjects).
- Psypluriel, European Centre for Medical Psychology (recruitment of ADHD subjects).
MRI scans are performed at the Radiology Service of the Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel (UZ-Brussel), together with Professor Johan de Mey, head of department and Peter Van Schuerbeek, MRI physicist.  Finally, the clinical database is centralized at the Laboratory of Experimental Neurology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) under the supervision of Dr. Massat. Preprocessing and statistical analyses of imaging data are conducted at UR2NF and CRCN, under the supervision of Dr. Massat, Prof. Philippe Peigneux and Thomas Villemonteix (Assistant professor at Paris 8 Vincennes - St Denis University).

Objectives of research

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are often viewed as independent neurodevelopmental disorders. Nowadays, partial similarities in cognitive and behavioural deficits raise discussions about their possible coexistence, and their underlying pathophysiological mechanisms.
In this project, we address this issue by investigating the cognitive profile and the neural processes underlying motor inhibition in ASD, ADHD, combined ASD-ADHD and typically developing children (TDC) through a clinical and neuropsychological assessment and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques.
First, a clinical and neuropsychological assessment allows performing between-group comparisons on collected qualitative and quantitative data, in order to identify the clinical and cognitive profile of the three phenotypes of interest (ASD, ADHD and combined ASD-ADHD).
Secondly, between-populations differences will be investigated at the functional level using qualitative (i.e., do same or different neural networks subtend inhibition?) and quantitative (i.e., are underlying neural networks recruited to the same extent?) analyses, and at the structural level computing grey matter volumes using Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) and probing the integrity of white matter tracts using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI).