Interaction Between Smoking and Internet Gaming Disorder on Spontaneous Brain Activity.

Xianxin Qiu,Fuchun Lin,Yao Wang,Xu Han,Yan Zhou,Hao Lei,Yawen Sun,Weina Ding

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2020.586114

Abstract

Converging lines of evidence indicates that smoking and internet gaming disorder (IGD) affect spontaneous brain activity, respectively. However, little is known about whether these two factors work together on the human brain. In this study, we investigated the interaction between smoking and IGD on local spontaneous brain activity using amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) based on resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI). Forty-six cigarette smokers, 38 IGD individuals, 34 participants with both IGD and cigarette smoking (IGD-Smoking), and 60 healthy individuals involved in the study. Voxel-wise analysis of covariance of ALFF revealed that there were significant interactions between IGD by smoking in the right medial pre-frontal cortex (MPFC)/ventral striatum, bilateral cerebellar, and visual-related regions as well as the left temporal gyrus. In the right MPFC/ventral striatum and left temporal gyrus, ALFF in smoking group was significantly higher than healthy group while there were no significant ALFF differences between IGD-Smoking group and IGD group. While in the bilateral cerebellar and visual-related regions, ALFF in the smoking group was significantly lower than healthy group while ALFF in IGD-Smoking group did not show significant difference with IGD group. In addition, in the smoking group, ALFF of the right MPFC/ventral striatum was associated positively with anxiety and depression scores while the ALFF value in the smoking group had a trend toward negative correlation with SDS scores in the bilateral cerebellar and visual-related regions. The ALFF value in the smoking group was associated positively with anxiety score in the left temporal gyrus. These findings indicate that smoking and IGD interacted with each other in the human brain. Our results, in terms of spontaneous brain activity, may imply the fact that IGD people are more tended to get smoking. Moreover, it is possible to predict that smokers may be more easily to get internet addiction than healthy people.

Highlights

Addiction is a complex phenomenon involving psychological and social consequences such as dependence, tolerance, sensitization, and craving [1, 2]
We found that the participants in smoking group with higher amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) values exhibited higher Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) (r = 0.313; p = 0.043), Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) (r = 0.372; p = 0.015) and motor impulsiveness dimension of Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS)-11 (r = 0.364; p = 0.018) scores in the right medial pre-frontal cortex (MPFC)/ventral striatum and SDS (r = −0.349; p = 0.024) scores in the bilateral cerebellar and visual-related regions, and higher SAS score (p = 0.049, r = 0.305) the left temporal gyrus
Our findings demonstrated that there were significant smoking by internet gaming disorder (IGD) interactions on ALFF in the right MPFC/ventral striatum, left temporal gyrus, and bilateral cerebellar and visualrelated regions

Summary

Introduction

Addiction is a complex phenomenon involving psychological and social consequences such as dependence, tolerance, sensitization, and craving [1, 2]. Studies based on questionnaires suggest that the youthful initiation of internet addiction in teenage students could be predicted by smoking [8,9,10]. Subjects with both nicotine dependence and IGD demonstrated a greater degree of urge activities in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and parahippocampus in comparison to the controls [11]. Compared with healthy controls, both IGD and smoking groups showed significantly different restingstate functional connectivity (rsFC). Significant rsFC differences were found between IGD and smoking groups [13]

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