Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, United States.
Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, United States.
Drug Alcohol Depend. 2019 Apr 1;197:288-298. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2019.02.005. Epub 2019 Feb 13.
Individuals who abuse substances often differ from nonusers in their brain structure. Substance abuse and addiction is often associated with atrophy and pathology of grey matter, but much less is known about the role of white matter, which constitutes over half of human brain volume. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a method for non-invasively estimating white matter, is increasingly being used to study addiction and substance abuse. Here we review recent DTI studies of major substances of abuse (alcohol, opiates, cocaine, cannabis, and nicotine substance abuse) to examine the relationship, specificity, causality, and permanence of substance-related differences in white matter microstructure. Across substance, users tended to exhibit differences in the microstructure of major fiber pathways, such as the corpus callosum. The direction of these differences, however, appeared substance-dependent. The subsample of longitudinal studies reviewed suggests that substance abuse may cause changes in white matter, though it is unclear to what extent such alterations are permanent. While collectively informative, some studies reviewed were limited by methodological and technical approach. We therefore also provide methodological guidance for future research using DTI to study substance abuse.
滥用药物的个体与非使用者在大脑结构上存在差异。药物滥用和成瘾通常与灰质的萎缩和病变有关，但对于构成人脑体积一半以上的白质的作用知之甚少。弥散张量成像（DTI）是一种非侵入性估计白质的方法，越来越多地用于研究成瘾和药物滥用。在这里，我们回顾了最近关于主要滥用药物（酒精、阿片类药物、可卡因、大麻和尼古丁滥用）的 DTI 研究，以检查与物质相关的白质微观结构差异的关系、特异性、因果关系和永久性。在各种物质中，使用者往往表现出主要纤维通路（如胼胝体）的微观结构差异。然而，这些差异的方向似乎取决于物质。我们回顾的纵向研究子样本表明，物质滥用可能导致白质发生变化，但尚不清楚这些改变在多大程度上是永久性的。尽管这些研究具有集体信息性，但其中一些研究受到方法和技术方法的限制。因此，我们还为使用 DTI 研究物质滥用的未来研究提供了方法学指导。
