Brain Imaging Correlates

Because aggressive behavior occurs in so many psychiatric disorders, it is important to have an understanding of the aggression complex of symptoms, which occurs in posttraumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, dementia, schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and the obsessive-compulsive spectrum of disorders. The effective treatment of aggression symptoms would benefit from the identification of the neuroanatomical circuitry implicated in aggression, and a number of studies in humans and animals using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography provide evidence that helps identify this circuitry. However, future research still must address several questions.