Abstract
Striatal circuit dysfunction is implicated in smoking behaviors and lapses during abstinence attempts. However, little is known about whether the structural connectivity of striatal tracts can be used to predict abstinence-induced craving and lapses. The tract strengths of striatal circuits were compared in 53 male nicotine-dependent cigarette smokers and 58 matched nonsmokers, using seed-based classification by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) probabilistic tractography with 10 a priori target masks. A 12-h abstinence procedure was then employed, after which 31 individuals abstained and 22 lapsed. Linear regression and binary logistic regression was conducted to test whether the tract strength of frontostriatal circuits was associated with craving changes in abstainers and predicted lapse in smokers. Compared with nonsmokers, in the left hemisphere, smokers showed weaker tract strength in striatum-medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), striatum-ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), striatum-inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and striatum-posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) (Bonferroni corrected, p < 0.05/20 = 0.0025). In abstainers, the abstinence-induced increases in craving were associated with the tract strength of the left striatum-mOFC and striatum-vlPFC. The tract strength of left striatum-dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) predicted lapse in smokers with an accuracy of 68.3%. These results provide system-level insights into the weaker tract strength of frontostriatal circuits in male smokers and their potential roles as neuroimaging markers for abstinence-induced craving and risk of lapse. Future studies in female smokers are needed to determine if this generalizes across genders.
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Change history
12 March 2019
The affiliation of Dahua Yu, which was incorrectly stated as affiliation 3 (Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging Ministry of Education, 710071, Xi’an Shaanxi, People’s Republic of China), when this author is actually linked to affiliation 4 (Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Image Processing, School of Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, 014010, Baotou, Inner Mongolia, People’s Republic of China).
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Funding
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 81871426, 81871430, 81571751, 81571753, 61771266, 31800926 and 81701780, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under the Grant No. JB151204, the program for Young Talents of Science and Technology in Universities of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region NJYT-17-B11, the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia under Grant No. 2017MS(LH)0814, the program of Science and Technology in Universities of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region NJZY17262, the Innovation Fund Project of Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology No. 2015QNGG03, National Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province under Grant no. 2018JM7075 and the US National Institutes of Health, Intramural Research program Y1AA3009. We thank Zaixu Cui from University of Pennsylvania for his technical assisstance in prediction methods.
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The study was approved by the ethics committee of medical research in First Affiliated Hospital of Baotou Medical College, Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, Baotou, China. After the study procedure was fully explained, all participants gave written informed consent. All experimental procedures followed the guidelines of human medical research (Declaration of Helsinki).
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Yuan, K., Zhao, M., Yu, D. et al. Striato-cortical tracts predict 12-h abstinence-induced lapse in smokers. Neuropsychopharmacol 43, 2452–2458 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-018-0182-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-018-0182-x
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