Citation

Devine DP. Methods Mol. Biol. 2012; 829: 65-84.

Affiliation

Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA, dpdevine@ufl.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/978-1-61779-458-2_4

PMID

22231807

Abstract

Self-injurious behaviour is highly prevalent in neurodevelopmental disorders. Interestingly, it is not restricted to any individual diagnostic group. Rather, it is exhibited in various forms across patient groups with distinct genetic defects and classifications of disorders. This suggests that there may be shared neuropathology that confers vulnerability. Convergent evidence from clinical pharmacotherapy, brain imaging studies, postmortem neurochemical analyses, and animal models indicates that dopaminergic insufficiency is a key culprit. This chapter provides an overview of studies in which animal models have been used to investigate the biochemical basis of self-injury, and highlights the convergence in findings between these models and expression of self-injury in humans.

Language: en