Lawyer Glenn, Bjerkan Petr S, Hammarberg Anders, Jayaram-Lindström Nitya, Franck Johan, Agartz Ingrid
Department of Psychiatry, University of Oslo, Norway.
BMC Pharmacol. 2010 May 20;10:5. doi: 10.1186/1471-2210-10-5.
Long-term amphetamine and methamphetamine dependence has been linked to cerebral blood perfusion, metabolic, and white matter abnormalities. Several studies have linked methamphetamine abuse to cortical grey matter reduction, though with divergent findings. Few publications investigate unmethylated amphetamine's potential effects on cortical grey matter. This work investigated if amphetamine dependent patients showed reduced cortical grey matter thickness. Subjects were 40 amphetamine dependent subjects and 40 healthy controls. While all subjects were recruited to be free of alcohol dependence, structured clinical interviews revealed significant patterns of alcohol use in the patients. Structural magnetic resonance brain images were obtained from the subjects using a 1.5 Tesla GE Signa machine. Brain cortical thickness was measured with submillimeter precision at multiple finely spaced cortical locations using semi-automated post-processing (FreeSurfer). Contrast analysis of a general linear model was used to test for differences between the two groups at each cortical location. In addition to contrasting patients with controls, a number of analyses sought to identify possible confounding effects from alcohol.
No significant cortical thickness differences were observed between the full patient group and controls, nor between non-drinking patients and controls. Patients with a history of co-morbid heavy alcohol use (n = 29) showed reductions in the superior-frontal right hemisphere and pre-central left hemisphere when compared to healthy controls (n = 40).
Amphetamine usage was associated with reduced cortical thickness only in patients co-morbid for heavy alcohol use. Since cortical thickness is but one measure of brain structure and does not capture brain function, further studies of brain structure and function in amphetamine dependence are warranted.
长期使用苯丙胺和甲基苯丙胺成瘾与脑血流灌注、代谢及白质异常有关。多项研究将甲基苯丙胺滥用与皮质灰质减少联系起来，不过结果存在分歧。很少有出版物研究未甲基化苯丙胺对皮质灰质的潜在影响。这项研究调查了苯丙胺依赖患者的皮质灰质厚度是否降低。研究对象为40名苯丙胺依赖者和40名健康对照者。虽然所有研究对象均招募为无酒精依赖者，但结构化临床访谈显示患者存在显著的饮酒模式。使用1.5特斯拉GE Signa机器从研究对象获取脑部结构磁共振图像。使用半自动后处理（FreeSurfer）在多个精细间隔的皮质位置以亚毫米精度测量脑皮质厚度。使用一般线性模型的对比分析来测试两组在每个皮质位置的差异。除了对比患者与对照者外，多项分析试图确定酒精可能产生的混杂效应。
在整个患者组与对照者之间，以及不饮酒患者与对照者之间，均未观察到显著的皮质厚度差异。与健康对照者（n = 40）相比，有合并重度饮酒史的患者（n = 29）在右额上叶和左中央前回出现皮质厚度降低。
仅在合并重度饮酒的患者中，苯丙胺使用与皮质厚度降低有关。由于皮质厚度只是脑结构的一种测量指标，无法反映脑功能，因此有必要对苯丙胺成瘾的脑结构和功能进行进一步研究。
