From the report: "Here we use neuroimaging and voxel-based morphometry to examine brain gray matter in incarcerated male adolescents who committed homicide (n

From the report: "Here we use neuroimaging and voxel-based morphometry to examine brain gray matter in incarcerated male adolescents who committed homicide (n = 20) compared with incarcerated offenders who did not commit homicide (n = 135). Two additional control groups were used to understand further the nature of gray matter differences: incarcerated offenders who did not commit homicide matched on important demographic and psychometric variables (n = 20) and healthy participants from the community (n = 21)." Perhaps someone with expertise can comment on a couple of points: 1) Am I correct that this research is preliminary, given the number of subjects involved? It seems too preliminary to even report on HN (to answer my own question), but maybe I don't understand it well enough. 2) Is there reason to believe that the brain differences caused the homicide, rather than believe that committing homicide and getting incarcerated, two very traumatic events, caused changes to their brains? Or that something very traumatic caused them both the crime and the brain changes?