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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on June 11, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(2):445-454; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn095
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Striatal Dopamine and Working Memory

Susan M. Landau1,2, Rayhan Lal1, James P. O'Neil2, Suzanne Baker2 and William J. Jagust1,2

1 Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3190, USA, 2 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Department of Functional Imaging, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Address correspondence to Susan M. Landau, PhD, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, 132 Barker Hall #3190, Berkeley, CA 94720-3192. Email: slandau{at}berkeley.edu.

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for working memory (WM) function, although this system has rarely been studied in humans in vivo. However, dopamine and PFC activity can be directly measured with positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), respectively. In this study, we examined WM capacity, dopamine, and PFC function in healthy older participants in order to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between these 3 factors. We used the PET tracer 6-[18F]fluoro-L-m-tyrosine to measure dopamine synthesis capacity in the striatum (caudate, putamen), and event-related fMRI to measure brain activation during different epochs (cue, delay, probe) of a WM task. Caudate (but not putamen) dopamine correlated positively with WM capacity, whereas putamen (but not caudate) dopamine correlated positively with motor speed. In addition, delay-related fMRI activation in a left inferior prefrontal region was related to both caudate dopamine and task accuracy, suggesting that this may be a critical site for the integration of WM maintenance processes. These results provide new evidence that striatal dopaminergic function is related to PFC-dependent functions, particularly brain activation and behavioral performance during WM tasks.

Key Words: aging • caudate • fMRI • maintenance • PET • putamen


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