Two new studies from the American Academy of Pediatrics look at how exposure to secondhand smoke affects American youths' learning behaviors and their attitudes toward smoking. The first found that children exposed to secondhand smoke in the home had a 50% increased risk of developing two or more childhood neurobehavioral disorders compared with children who were not exposed at home.
This has been discussed and tried as a treatment for eons by parents (myself included) not wanting to put their kids on serious drugs. Most psychiatrists do not back it up as viable so having an article in JAMA about it is a huge change in perspective and it comes on the heels of research showing pretty serious side effects to the pharmaceutical treatments.
As exciting as such advances are, brain imaging is still primarily a research tool when it comes to mental disorders. Scans are appropriate for ruling out obvious pathology, like brain tumors, as possible causes of symptoms. The differences in brain structure and activity seen in disorders like schizophrenia or ADHD, for example, are typically only meaningful when comparing group statistics. There is simply too much individual variation in brain structure and function for an individual's scan to be diagnostic or predictive, given the current state of the science.