Question: can you tell without a mri scan that a child has behavioural problems?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Definitely – the best way to see whether a child has behavioural problems is to watch them, or ask their teacher or parents.

Brain scans have the capacity to be useful, but I do think that getting evidence from people around the child is the most important thing. Our brains are all a tiny bit different, and when you’re looking at one individual brain scan on its own, it’s tough to tell what you’d really be looking for in a child with behavioural problems. For me, MRI scans of children with behavioural problems are useful for telling me what sort of areas might be different for these children – since we’ve found out that some areas associated with emotion understanding are different, then it makes sense to me to examine actual emotion understanding in the children – do brain differences always equal behavioural differences? It’s definitely important not to rely too heavily on scans and to work with what we see in front of us too.