Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI, 53706, USA.
Sci Rep. 2018 Nov 12;8(1):16702. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-34987-3.
Alcohol use is common, imposes a staggering burden on public health, and often resists treatment. The central extended amygdala (EAc)-including the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST) and the central nucleus of the amygdala (Ce)-plays a key role in prominent neuroscientific models of alcohol drinking, but the relevance of these regions to acute alcohol consumption in humans remains poorly understood. Using a single-blind, randomized-groups design, multiband fMRI data were acquired from 49 social drinkers while they performed a well-established emotional faces paradigm after consuming either alcohol or placebo. Relative to placebo, alcohol significantly dampened reactivity to emotional faces in the BST. To rigorously assess potential regional differences in activation, data were extracted from unbiased, anatomically predefined regions of interest. Analyses revealed similar levels of dampening in the BST and Ce. In short, alcohol transiently reduces reactivity to emotional faces and it does so similarly across the two major divisions of the human EAc. These observations reinforce the translational relevance of addiction models derived from preclinical work in rodents and provide new insights into the neural systems most relevant to the consumption of alcohol and to the initial development of alcohol abuse in humans.
饮酒行为普遍存在，给公共卫生带来了巨大负担，且往往难以治疗。在突出的酒精摄入神经科学模型中，中央延伸杏仁核（EAc）——包括终纹床核（BST）和杏仁中央核（Ce）——发挥着关键作用，但这些区域与人类急性酒精消费的相关性仍知之甚少。使用单盲、随机分组设计，在 49 名社交饮酒者饮用酒精或安慰剂后进行经过充分验证的情绪面孔范式时，获取了多波段 fMRI 数据。与安慰剂相比，酒精显著减弱了 BST 对情绪面孔的反应性。为了严格评估激活的潜在区域差异，从无偏、解剖学预先定义的感兴趣区域中提取数据。分析显示 BST 和 Ce 中的抑制程度相似。总之，酒精会短暂降低对情绪面孔的反应性，并且在人类 EAc 的两个主要分区中都是如此。这些观察结果强化了源自啮齿动物临床前研究的成瘾模型的转化相关性，并为与酒精消费和人类酒精滥用初始发展最相关的神经系统提供了新的见解。
