Imaging Techniques and Pediatric Psychopathology
Friday, 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM
Hynes CC 312

Speaker: Daniel Pine, National Institute of Mental Health
Chair: Charles A. Nelson, Boston Children’s Hospital

Biographical Sketch
Daniel Pine, M.D. is currently Chief, Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience and Chief of Child and Adolescent Research in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health Intramural Research Program. Dr. Pine moved to this position in the fall of 2000, after 10 years of training, teaching, and research at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Since graduating from medical school at the University of Chicago, Dr. Pine has been engaged continuously in research focusing on the epidemiology, biology and treatment of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents. His areas of expertise include biological and pharmacological aspects of mood, anxiety, and behavioral disorders in children, as reflected in a series of more than 80 papers on these topics. Dr. Pine also possesses expertise in the biological commonalities and differences among psychiatric disorders of children, adolescents, and adults as well as on interfaces between psychiatric and medical disorders.

Abstract
Dr. Pine’s presentation will review the nature of recent findings in basic domains, utilizing methods from affective neuroscience, and in clinical domains, utilizing methods from developmental psychopathology. These findings will then be placed in a broad integrative perspective, which emphasizes the need to integrate findings from these two major theoretical schools. Such integrative perspectives hold the hope of informing clinical approaches to developmental psychopathologies. In terms of specific findings on anxiety, Dr. Pine’s presentation will be based on three major insights. First, studies in both animal models and adult humans have delineated a network of brain regions that is engaged during the processing of dangerous situations or stimuli. This network involves connections among prefrontal cortical structures and structures in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, including the amygdala and hippocampus. Second, studies in animal models demonstrate that between-group differences in organisms’ responses to danger reflect functional aspects of this circuit. These cross-organism differences are shaped during development by parallel effects on brain and behavior involving interactions between genes and the environment. Third, studies in humans find that problems with anxiety during childhood represent robust predictors of various adult mental disorders, particularly mood and anxiety disorders. The most recent data in humans uses methods from brain imaging to implicate a shared neuronal topography in developmental relationships among psychopathologies. This work shows that pathophysiology of both pediatric and adult mood and anxiety disorders involves similar perturbations in prefrontal cortical and medial temporal structures.