Abnormalities in sustained attention and anterior cingulate metabolism in subjects with resistance to thyroid hormone

Attention deficit disorders are a frequent manifestation of resistance to thyroid hormone (RTH), a disorder caused by mutations in the hormone-binding domain of the human thyroid hormone receptor beta gene. Positron emission tomography was used to measure cerebral glucose metabolism in regions known to be biological determinants of sustained attention in 13 adult RTH and 13 unaffected subjects. Compared to the control group, performance on a continuous auditory discrimination task was severely impaired in the RTH subjects, while metabolism was higher both in the right parietal cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus. Abnormally high functional activity of the anterior cingulate during sustained attention may be associated with a decreased signal-to-noise ratio for the neural processing of task stimuli in subjects with RTH.