I would like to reply to Cumming, Reith, and Gjedde regarding our study (“Decreasing Striatal 6-FDOPA Uptake with Increasing Duration of Cocaine Withdrawal”) which is the first study to assess the effects of chronic cocaine use on the cerebral uptake of 6-[18F]-fluoro-L-DOPA (FDOPA) which is a tracer for DOPA decarboxylase in catechola-mine fibers of the living human brain (Wu et al. 1997).

We appreciate the correspondents' comment regarding the ingenuity of our method for defining contiguous regions for statistical comparisons of K. There were some requests for additional information regarding several points, which we provide in this response. First, there was a request for how the regions of interest and reference regions were delineated. The regions of interest were manually drawn from an averaged normal control striatal FDOPA image from a preliminary study. The reference regions were placed in the occipito-temporal junction, which has low cortical dopaminergic input.

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