Abstract
Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to evaluate the effects of oral d-amphetamine on brain activation elicited by auditory and simple motor tasks in ten normal right-handed subjects. We measured the percent signal change and number of voxels activated by a tone discrimination task and a right hand finger-tapping task after 20 mg of d-amphetamine and after placebo. Compared to placebo, amphetamine significantly increased the number of activated voxels in the left and right primary auditory cortices during the tone discrimination task and increased the number of activated voxels in the ipsilateral primary sensorimotor cortex and right middle frontal area during the motor task. Although highly specific vascular effects of drug cannot be ruled out as an explanation, these results could also mean that amphetamine increases the neuronal activity associated with each of these two tasks.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Alyson Schuster for her help in subject preparation and in running the fMRI experiments. This work was supported in part by grants from the Brain Research Foundation, the Center for Early Childhood Research, General Electric Medical Systems, and the NIH (R01 HD32665, DA02812, 5T32 CA09649).
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Uftring, S., Wachtel, S., Chu, D. et al. An fMRI Study of the Effect of Amphetamine on Brain Activity. Neuropsychopharmacol 25, 925–935 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0893-133X(01)00311-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0893-133X(01)00311-6
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