The goal of this study was to examine the association between family history of alcohol use disorders and frontoparietal connectivity in substance-naïve youth. Prior research has highlighted neurocognitive and neurobiological abnormalities among FHP youth, and therefore, we predicted that FHP youth would exhibit weaker frontoparietal connectivity and altered white matter fiber tract organization and integrity compared to age-matched FHN youth. FHP youth demonstrated reduced functional connectivity between PPC and DLPFC compared to FHN youth. Frontoparietal circuitry, which includes areas of the dorsal attention network (Corbetta and Schulman, 2002), continues to develop from short-range, local connections to long-range, integrated networks during adolescence and into adulthood (Fair et al., 2007; 2009). Thus, our findings suggest that weaker frontoparietal connectivity among FHP youth may be indicative of a neurodevelopmental delay whereby FHP youth exhibit weaker long-range connections (i.e., correlation between BOLD time series in PPC to DLPFC) than their FHN counterparts. Follow-up correlation analyses revealed that functional connectivity between the PPC and DLPFC was negatively associated with number of missed responses during a supra-span visual working memory task, specifically among substance-naïve FHN youth.
