Altered Global Signal Topography in Alcohol Use Disorders

Ranran Duan,Jingliang Cheng,Yong Zhang,Zhe Gong,Li Li,Yanfei Li,Weijian Wang,Ying Peng,Yaobing Yao,Lijun Jing,Yanjie Jia

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2022.803780

Abstract

The most common symptom of patients with alcohol use disorders (AUD) is cognitive impairment that negatively affects abstinence. Presently, there is a lack of indicators for early diagnosis of alcohol-related cognitive impairment (ARCI). We aimed to assess the cognitive deficits in AUD patients with the help of a specific imaging marker for ARCI. Data-driven dynamic and static global signal topography (GST) methods were applied to explore the cross-talks between local and global neuronal activities in the AUD brain. Twenty-six ARCI, 54 AUD without cognitive impairment (AUD-NCI), and gender/age-matched 40 healthy control (HC) subjects were recruited for this study. We found that there was no significant difference with respect to voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and static GST between AUD-NCI and ARCI groups. And in dynamic GST measurements, the AUD-NCI patients had the highest coefficient of variation (CV) at the right insula, followed by ARCI and the HC subjects. In precuneus, the order was reversed. There was no significant correlation between the dynamic GST and behavioral scores or alcohol consumption. These results suggested that dynamic GST might have potential implications in understanding AUD pathogenesis and disease management.

Highlights

Uncontrolled and persistent alcohol consumption can exert a multitude of adverse health effects, such as chronic liver and kidney damages, and is considered a global public health concern
Alcohol addiction can potentially increase the risks of suicidal tendency due to impaired judgment capacity, increased impulsivity related to mood disorders, psychotic disorders, anxiety, and cognitive deficits (Kudva et al, 2021)
Using a threshold of FWE-corrected p < 0.05, Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) analyses could not show any differences between the healthy control (HC), Alcohol use disorder (AUD)-NCI, and alcohol-related cognitive impairment (ARCI) groups

Summary

Introduction

Uncontrolled and persistent alcohol consumption can exert a multitude of adverse health effects, such as chronic liver and kidney damages, and is considered a global public health concern. Alcohol use disorder (AUD) or alcoholism is a widespread health burden worldwide, affecting individuals at any level of socio-economic status. Like dose-dependent toxicity in most fatal health problems, heavy consumption of alcohol is directly related to an increased risk of developing AUD-linked multi-organ disorders (Schuckit, 2009). It has been found that chronic alcohol abuseinduced thiamine deficiency serves as the major pathological contributor to AUDs, including alcohol-related brain damage (ARBD), with the symptomatic manifestation of cognitive deficits, apathy, severe memory deficits, vision impairment, and confabulations (Toledo Nunes et al, 2019; Kim et al, 2020; Oey et al, 2021). Patients suffering from alcohol-related cognitive impairment (ARCI; Heirene et al, 2018) themselves do not lodge subjective complaints, possibly due to the lack of judgment ability under the influence of addiction (Walvoort et al, 2016). There is an urgent need to explore the underlying pathophysiological processes and identify biomarkers

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