Guangdong Key Lab of Medical Molecular Imaging, the First Affiliated Hospital, Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, China.
Neuroimage. 2010 Jan 1;49(1):971-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.08.020. Epub 2009 Aug 14.
Long-term exposure to drug may alter the neural system associated with affective processing, as evidenced by both clinical observations and behavioral data documenting dysfunctions in emotional experiences and processing in drug addicts. Although many imaging studies examined neural responses to drug or drug-related cues in addicts, there have been few studies explicitly designed to reveal their neural abnormalities in processing non-drug-related natural affective materials. The present study asked abstinent heroin addicts and normal controls to passively view standardized affective pictures of positive, negative, or neutral valence and compared their brain activities with functional MRI. Compared to normal controls, addicts showed reduced activation in right amygdala in response to the affective pictures, consistent with previous reports of blunted subjective experience for affective stimuli in addicts. Furthermore, in two visual cortical areas BA 19 and 37, while the controls showed greater responses to positive pictures than to negative ones replicating literature findings, the addicts showed the opposite pattern. The results reveal a complex pattern of altered processing of non-drug-related affective materials in addicts showing both heightened and blunted neural responses in different brain regions and for different stimulus valence. The present study highlights the importance of brain imaging research on drug addicts' processing of affective stimuli in understanding disruptions in their emotion circuitry.
长期接触毒品可能会改变与情感处理相关的神经系统，这既有临床观察的证据，也有行为数据记录了吸毒者在情感体验和处理方面的功能障碍。尽管许多影像学研究都研究了吸毒者对毒品或与毒品相关的线索的神经反应，但很少有研究专门揭示他们在处理非毒品相关的自然情感材料时的神经异常。本研究要求海洛因成瘾者和正常对照组被动观看正性、负性或中性效价的标准化情感图片，并使用功能磁共振成像比较他们的大脑活动。与正常对照组相比，成瘾者在对情感图片的反应中右侧杏仁核的激活减少，这与之前报道的成瘾者对情感刺激的主观体验迟钝一致。此外，在两个视觉皮层区域 BA19 和 37 中，对照组对正性图片的反应大于对负性图片的反应，这与文献发现一致，而成瘾者则表现出相反的模式。研究结果揭示了成瘾者对非药物相关情感材料处理的复杂模式，表现出不同大脑区域和不同刺激效价的增强和迟钝的神经反应。本研究强调了对吸毒者处理情感刺激的大脑成像研究的重要性，这有助于理解他们的情绪回路中断。
