Yang Zhengui, Wen Mengmeng, Wei Yarui, Huang Huiyu, Zheng Ruiping, Wang Weijian, Gao Xinyu, Zhang Mengzhe, Cheng Jingliang, Han Shaoqiang, Zhang Yong
Department of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China.
Key Laboratory for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Molecular Imaging of Henan Province, Zhengzhou, China.
Front Psychiatry. 2022 Apr 21;13:843254. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.843254. eCollection 2022.
Previous studies have implicated abnormal functional coordination in brain regions of smokers. Neuroimaging studies demonstrated alternations in brain connectivity by using the resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) method which arbitrarily chooses specific networks or seed regions as priori selections and cannot provide a full picture of the FC changes in chronic smokers. The aim of this study was to investigate the whole-brain functional coordination measured by functional connectivity density (FCD). As the variance of brain activity, dynamic FCD (dFCD) was performed to investigate dynamic changes of whole-brain integration in chronic smokers. In total, 120 chronic smokers and 56 nonsmokers were recruited, and static FCD and dFCD were performed to investigate aberrance of whole-brain functional coordination. Shared aberrance in visual areas has been found in both static and dFCD study in chronic smokers. Furthermore, the results exhibited that both heavy and light smokers demonstrated decreased dFCD in the visual cortex and left precuneus, and also increased dFCD in the right orbitofrontal cortex, left caudate, right putamen, and left thalamus compared with nonsmokers. In addition, alternations of dFCD have been found between heavy and light smokers. Furthermore, the dFCD variations showed significant positive correlation with smoking-related behaviors. The results demonstrated that chronic smokers not only have some initial areas, but also have some regions associated with severity of cigarette smoking. Lastly, dFCD could provide more subtle variations in chronic smokers, and the combination of static and dFCD may deepen our understanding of the brain alternations in chronic smokers.
先前的研究表明吸烟者大脑区域存在异常的功能协调。神经影像学研究通过静息态功能连接（rsFC）方法证明了大脑连接性的改变，该方法任意选择特定网络或种子区域作为先验选择，无法全面呈现慢性吸烟者功能连接（FC）的变化情况。本研究的目的是通过功能连接密度（FCD）来研究全脑功能协调。作为大脑活动的方差，进行动态FCD（dFCD）以研究慢性吸烟者全脑整合的动态变化。总共招募了120名慢性吸烟者和56名非吸烟者，并进行了静态FCD和dFCD以研究全脑功能协调的异常情况。在慢性吸烟者的静态和dFCD研究中均发现了视觉区域的共同异常。此外，结果显示，与非吸烟者相比，重度和轻度吸烟者在视觉皮层和左侧楔前叶的dFCD均降低，而在右侧眶额皮层、左侧尾状核、右侧壳核和左侧丘脑的dFCD均升高。此外，重度和轻度吸烟者之间发现了dFCD的变化。此外，dFCD变化与吸烟相关行为呈显著正相关。结果表明，慢性吸烟者不仅有一些初始区域，而且还有一些与吸烟严重程度相关的区域。最后，dFCD可以在慢性吸烟者中提供更细微的变化，静态和dFCD的结合可能会加深我们对慢性吸烟者大脑变化的理解。
