Applying Imaging Genetics to ADHD: the Promises and the Challenges

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most prevalent childhood psychiatric disorders. During the past decades, studies have focused on its genetic background and the abnormality of the brain structure and function. Recently, an advanced technique linking these two areas, namely, the imaging genetics emerged and kept growing. Imaging genetics primarily identifies genes that influence the brain variations. There are three main strategies of doing an imaging genetic study: using neuroimaging as endophenotypes to find the associated DNA variants, finding neuroimaging effects of risk genes, and hypothesis-free whole-brain voxelwise genome-wide association study. In this review, we begin with demonstrating the basic principles of imaging genetics precisely, with examples from other psychiatric conditions, and then go on to synthesize the existing imaging genetic studies in ADHD. Finally, we elaborate the challenges of applying imaging genetics to ADHD. We conclude that imaging genetics has somewhat showed its potential to provide a more precise understanding of how the genes shape the brain variations and further the clinical features of ADHD.