This Child and Adolescent Clinical Mental Health Academic Award (CMHAA) provides a training program to establish the PI as an academic scholar and independent researcher in the area of child and adolescent mood disorders. Mood disorders among children and adolescents are prevalent, serious, but the neurobiology of these disorders has not been well studied using any functional brain imaging techniques. This training-program allows the PI to pursue and develop a research program to explore the functional neuroanatomy o child and adolescent major depressive disorder using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). In the research portion of this submission, the PI proposes to measure regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) using 3-headed high resolution full- volume SPECT instrument, in two groups of children and adolescents: 1) 30 child and adolescent outpatients in the symptomatic, depressed state, who meet DSM IV criteria for an episode of major depressive disorder; 2) 30 age- and gender matched normal controls. The primary aims of this research are: (I) to identify and characterize differences in the three-dimensional distribution of rCBF between depressed and normal children and adolescents in the resting state; (2) to determine if the rCBF patterns of depressed children and adolescents are similar to the rCBF patterns of depressed adults; (3) to examine the effects of age and gender upon rCBF in normal children and adolescents; (4) to examine the effects of age and gender upon rCBF in depressed children and adolescents
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