Abstract
The increasing public health impact of addictive disorders and obesity has led to an emphasis on studying the neurobiology of reward. Studies of reward integrate basic and cognitive neuroscience with in vivo approaches in humans. In this issue of PNAS, Dreher et al. (1) use neuroimaging to visualize the in vivo neurochemistry and neural circuitry of reward in older and younger adults. They show different relationships (1) between estimated dopa decarboxylase activity (DDC), assessed through PET measurement of the presynaptic dopamine (DA) system with [18F]flurodopa (FDopa), a radiolabeled derivative of dopa (measure of DA), and reward measured by fMRI networks. They found that midbrain measures of FDopa correlated positively with the BOLD signal after tasks eliciting a reward mechanism in youth but negatively in aged subjects. There were also regional differences in brain activation between the two age groups.
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