McLean Neuroimaging Center, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA, USA.
McLean Neuroimaging Center, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA; Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA.
Drug Alcohol Depend. 2016 Feb 1;159:277-80. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2015.12.010. Epub 2015 Dec 23.
Individuals who smoke more cigarettes per day are at greater risk for developing smoking-related illness and have more difficulty quitting. Withdrawal-related negative mood is one factor thought to motivate drug use. However, heavy smokers are generally more sensitive to negative affect, not just negative emotion stemming from withdrawal. One possibility is that individual differences in how the brain processes negative stimuli may impact smoking use. Given the wealth of data implicating the insula in nicotine dependence and affective processing we hypothesize that the number of cigarettes an individual smokes per day will relate to insula reactivity to negative stimuli.
A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) emotional processing task collected by the Human Connectome Project was assessed in 21 daily tobacco smokers who reported smoking between 5 and 20 cigarettes per day. The number of cigarettes smoked per day was correlated with right and left anterior insula reactivity to faces expressing a negative emotion relative to a control. This anterior insula region of interest has been associated with treatment outcome and smoking cue-reactivity in our prior work.
Those who smoked more daily cigarettes showed greater right insula reactivity to negative stimuli (r=0.564, p=0.008). Left insula reactivity was not associated with cigarettes smoked per day.
Smokers who use more cigarettes per day have greater insula reactivity to negative stimuli, furthering the field's understanding of the insula's involvement in nicotine use. This preliminary work also suggests a mechanism contributing to higher rates of daily smoking.
每天吸烟量越多的个体，发展与吸烟相关的疾病的风险越高，戒烟的难度也越大。戒断相关的负性情绪被认为是促使药物使用的一个因素。然而，重度吸烟者通常对负性情绪更为敏感，不仅仅是戒断引起的负性情绪。一种可能性是，大脑处理负性刺激的个体差异可能会影响吸烟行为。鉴于大量数据表明脑岛与尼古丁依赖和情感处理有关，我们假设个体每天吸烟的数量与脑岛对负性刺激的反应有关。
通过人类连接组计划收集了功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）情感处理任务，该任务评估了 21 名每日吸烟的烟民，他们报告每天吸烟 5 至 20 支。每天吸烟的数量与右侧和左侧前脑岛对表达负性情绪的面孔的反应性相关，相对于对照。我们之前的研究表明，这个前脑岛感兴趣区域与治疗结果和吸烟线索反应性有关。
那些每天吸烟更多的人对负性刺激的右侧脑岛反应更强（r=0.564，p=0.008）。左侧脑岛的反应性与每天吸烟的数量无关。
每天吸烟更多的吸烟者对负性刺激的脑岛反应更强，这进一步加深了我们对脑岛在尼古丁使用中的作用的理解。这项初步研究还表明，这一机制可能导致更高的每日吸烟率。
