# Neurobehavioral Determinants of Health Risk Behaviors: From Adolescence to Young Adulthood

> **NIH NIH R01** · VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INST AND ST UNIV · 2021 · $770,967

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Health risk behaviors, such as substance use, are most prevalent during young adulthood and can lead to
addiction. Thus, it is crucial to identify factors that contribute to growth in these health risk behaviors during
young adulthood. A key feature of young adult health risk behaviors is delay or deficit in cognitive self-control
of impulses. This is because prefrontal regions of the brain—regions critical to impulse control—are still
maturing across young adulthood, a critical period of developmental transition with increasing independence in
social contexts imbued with greater risk-taking opportunities. Current neurobiological models focus on
developmental imbalance between the brain’s control and reward systems to explain the normative heightened
risk taking seen in adolescence. Yet, little is known about individual differences in brain development
underlying risky decision-making that leads to escalation of health risk behaviors from adolescence to young
adulthood. This application proposes to continue a longitudinal study of 167 adolescents (13/14 to 16/17 years)
throughout young adulthood (18/19 to 21/22 years) with intensive, repeated, multiple-level data (including
neuroimaging, behavioral performance, and self- and parent report). The sample involves adolescents from
understudied Appalachian rural communities that have high rates of substance abuse/addiction, and more
recently an opioid/heroin overdose crisis. The objective is to clarify dynamic interactions between
developmental trajectories of neural processes—risk/reward processing (valuation system) and cognitive
control (control system)—that produce differential vulnerability to health risk behaviors in adolescence and
young adulthood. The central hypotheses are: (1) the interplay between valuation and control systems
contributing to health risk behaviors will be shown by statistical interactions between valuation and control
neural activations as well as patterns of between-system connectivity; and (2) socioecological context effects
on neural processes will clarify conditions under which adolescent brain development may become
impoverished, and ultimately lead to suboptimal health behavior in young adulthood. The specific aims are to
examine long-term prospective effects of brain development in adolescence on health risk behaviors in young
adulthood as well as reciprocal effects of health risk behaviors on brain development (Aim 1) and to examine
effects of socioeconomic adversity (e.g., scarcity, low income-to-need ratio) in adolescence on health risk
behaviors in young adulthood, partially mediated through parenting contexts (e.g., parent self-regulation and
maladaptive parenting), with socioeconomic contextual factors that are unique to young adulthood (e.g.,
college attendance) predicting young adult health risk behaviors (Aim 2). These findings will yield critical
insights into the neural mechanisms underlying susceptibility to health risk behaviors in adoles...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10201536
- **Project number:** 5R01DA036017-09
- **Recipient organization:** VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INST AND ST UNIV
- **Principal Investigator:** Brooks Casas
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $770,967
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2013-09-15 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10201536

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10201536, Neurobehavioral Determinants of Health Risk Behaviors: From Adolescence to Young Adulthood (5R01DA036017-09). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10201536. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*