Abstract
Drug addiction is widely linked to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is essential for regulating reward-related behaviors, emotional responses, and anxiety. Over the past two decades, neuroimaging has provided significant contributions revealing functional and structural alternations in the brains of drug addicts. However, the underlying neural mechanism in the OFC and its correlates with drug addiction and anxiety still require further elucidation. We first presented a pilot investigation to examine local networks in OFC regions through resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) from eight abstinent addicts in a heroin-dependent group (HD) and seven subjects in a control group (CG). We discovered that the HDs manifested enhanced interhemispheric correlation and rsFC. Moreover, small-worldness was explored in the brain networks. In addition to the altered rsFC in the OFC networks, our examinations demonstrated associations in the functional connectivity between the left inferior frontal gyrus and other OFC regions related to anxiety in the HDs. The study provides important preliminary evidence of the complex OFC networks in heroin addiction and suggests neural correlates of anxiety. It opens a window in application of fNIRS to predict psychiatric trajectories and may create new insights into neural adaptations resulting from chronic opiate intake.
Highlights
Drug addiction is widely linked to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is essential for regulating reward-related behaviors, emotional responses, and anxiety
The results of the interhemispheric correlation analysis are shown in values in the lateral OFC (lOFC)
While examining the intuitive normalization method, where the heroin-dependent group (HD) brain network was compared to the control group (CG) brain network, and the classical normalization method, where the HD brain network was compared to random network, we found that the metrics were significantly different at a few short sparsity ranges (0.49
Summary
Drug addiction is widely linked to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is essential for regulating reward-related behaviors, emotional responses, and anxiety. The type of drug of abuse, the stage of the abuser, and other essential elements, such as comorbid anxiety or depression, and co-dependence on other substances, such as nicotine, should be considered and accounted in studies in order to better understand the essentiality of reward, anticipation, and cognition in the OFC networks. This may provide tools to predict relapse in individuals trying to recover from addiction
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