Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637,USA.
Neuropsychopharmacology. 2010 Feb;35(3):692-701. doi: 10.1038/npp.2009.177. Epub 2009 Nov 11.
A strong link exists between cigarette smoking and alcohol use, which may be explained by the experimental observation that alcohol ingestion promotes cigarette craving and precipitates smoking. At the neuroanatomic level, it is unclear where and how alcohol exerts these effects, although the process likely involves the ventral striatum given its function in motivational salience and appetitive reinforcement. In a double-blinded, placebo-controlled, crossover study, heavy drinking nondaily social smokers (ie, light smokers or 'chippers') were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging after they ingested an acute dose of alcohol or placebo. We probed reactivity in the ventral striatum and other brain regions during exposure to visual smoking vs nonsmoking control cues. We found that alcohol enhanced self-reported ratings of desire to smoke, and in this context, significantly increased ventral striatum responses to smoking compared with control cues. In exploratory analyses, we observed that alcohol dampened orbitofrontal activity across both cue types, whereas dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex activation to smoking cues was not affected by alcohol. This study bridges a pharmacological challenge approach to the study of brain reactivity to smoking cues, extends prior cigarette cue imaging studies to nondependent smokers, and elucidates a potential neurobiological mechanism to explain the co-consumption of alcohol and cigarettes in nondependent users.
吸烟和饮酒之间存在很强的关联，这可以通过实验观察得到解释，即饮酒会促进吸烟的欲望并促使吸烟。在神经解剖学水平上，尚不清楚酒精在何处以及如何发挥这些作用，尽管这一过程可能涉及腹侧纹状体，因为它在动机显著性和食欲强化方面发挥作用。在一项双盲、安慰剂对照、交叉研究中，我们使用功能磁共振成像检查了大量饮酒的非习惯性社交吸烟者（即轻度吸烟者或“浅尝者”）在摄入急性酒精或安慰剂后的反应。我们在暴露于视觉吸烟与非吸烟对照线索时，探测了腹侧纹状体和其他大脑区域的反应性。我们发现，酒精增强了自我报告的吸烟欲望评分，并且在这种情况下，与对照线索相比，吸烟线索显著增加了腹侧纹状体的反应。在探索性分析中，我们观察到酒精在两种线索类型上都降低了眶额皮层的活动，而背外侧前额叶和前扣带皮层对吸烟线索的激活不受酒精影响。这项研究将药理学挑战方法应用于对吸烟线索的大脑反应性研究，将之前的香烟线索成像研究扩展到非依赖吸烟者，并阐明了一种潜在的神经生物学机制，以解释非依赖使用者同时饮酒和吸烟的现象。
