Abstract
Chronic and recurrent opiate use injuries brain tissue and cause serious pathophysiological changes in hemodynamic and subsequent inflammatory responses. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been implicated in drug addiction. However, the mechanism underlying systems-level neuroadaptations in PFC during abstinence has not been fully characterized. The objective of our study was to determine what neural oscillatory activity contributes to the chronic effect of opiate exposure and whether the activity could be coupled to neurovascular information in the PFC. We employed resting-state functional connectivity to explore alterations in 8 patients with heroin dependency who stayed abstinent (>3 months; HD) compared with 11 control subjects. A non-invasive neuroimaging strategy was applied to combine electrophysiological signals through electroencephalography (EEG) with hemodynamic signals through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The electrophysiological signals indicate neural synchrony and the oscillatory activity, and the hemodynamic signals indicate blood oxygenation in small vessels in the PFC. A supervised machine learning method was used to obtain associations between EEG and fNIRS modalities to improve precision and localization. HD patients demonstrated desynchronized lower alpha rhythms and decreased connectivity in PFC networks. Asymmetric excitability and cerebrovascular injury were also observed. This pilot study suggests that cerebrovascular injury in PFC may result from chronic opiate intake.
Highlights
Chronic and recurrent opiate use injuries brain tissue and cause serious pathophysiological changes in hemodynamic and subsequent inflammatory responses
A total of 13 heroin-dependent patients (HD) who had been exposed to heroin for over 20 years and managed to stay abstinent for at least three months were enrolled from an in-patient drug rehabilitation treatment center in Macao SAR
There are growing separate bodies of resting-state studies demonstrating that both electrophysiology and hemodynamics can further enhance our knowledge of cognitive processing[30,31] and improve clinical diagnostics[32,33,34,35]
Summary
Chronic and recurrent opiate use injuries brain tissue and cause serious pathophysiological changes in hemodynamic and subsequent inflammatory responses. Characterizing a mesoscopic-scale PFC network in opiate addiction during protracted abstinence through rsFC may provide insights for deeper understanding of the neurophysiological aspect of brain activity during recovery. We used a bimodal non-invasive neuroimaging strategy that combined electroencephalography (EEG) to provide information about neural synchrony and oscillatory activity with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to provide complementary information about the cerebral blood oxygenation in small vessels in the PFC. This bimodality has several features designed to optimize homogeneity. We limited enrollment of heroin-dependent patients at their protracted abstinence stage in the addiction cycle because their findings may more likely demonstrate a pronounced effect of heroin and, perhaps, a sign of recovery
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