Acute Effect of Betel Quid Chewing on Brain Network Dynamics: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Abstract

Betel quid (BQ) is one of the most popular addictive substances in the world. However, the neurophysiological mechanism underlying BQ addiction remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate whether and how BQ chewing would affect brain function in the framework of a dynamic brain network model. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were collected from 24 male BQ-dependent individuals and 26 male non-addictive healthy individuals before and promptly after chewing BQ. Switching rate, a measure of temporal stability of functional brain networks, was calculated at both global and local levels for each scan. The results showed that BQ-dependent and healthy groups did not significantly differ on switching rate before BQ chewing (F = 0.784, p = 0.381, analysis of covariance controlling for age, education, and head motion). After chewing BQ, both BQ-dependent (t = 2.674, p = 0.014, paired t-test) and healthy (t = 2.313, p = 0.029, paired t-test) individuals showed a significantly increased global switching rate compared to those before chewing BQ. Significant corresponding local-level effects were observed within the occipital areas for both groups, and within the cingulo-opercular, fronto-parietal, and cerebellum regions for BQ-dependent individuals. Moreover, in BQ-dependent individuals, switching rate was significantly correlated with the severity of BQ addiction assessed by the Betel Quid Dependence Scale scores (Spearman's rho = 0.471, p = 0.020) before BQ chewing. Our study provides preliminary evidence for the acute effects of BQ chewing on brain functional dynamism. These findings may provide insights into the neural mechanisms of substance addictions.

Temporal Stability of the Dynamic Resting-State Functional Brain Network: Current Measures, Clinical Research Progress, and Future Perspectives

“…For example, Harlalka et al [ 84 ] found that patients with autism spectrum disorder showed a significant increase in dynamic variability (decreased temporal stability) in a wide range of brain network connections. Additionally, significantly decreased temporal stabilities of brain networks have been associated with both substance [ 85 ] and non-substance [ 59 ] addictions, suggesting that brain network instability may play an important role in the onset of these disorders.…”

Age-Related Decrease in Default-Mode Network Functional Connectivity Is Accelerated in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder

“…To calculate temporal variability of dFC, a widely used sliding-windows approach ( Long et al, 2020a ; Huang D. et al, 2021 ; Huang X. et al, 2021 ) was applied to segment the time series of all ROIs into a number of continuous time windows; in the primary analyses, a window width of 100 s and a step length of 6 s were used according to previous recommendations ( Sun et al, 2019 ; Long et al, 2020a ). The same as static FC, weighted adjacency matrices were computed in each time window to represent dFC during different time periods.…”

Temporal Stability of Dynamic Default Mode Network Connectivity Negatively Correlates with Suicidality in Major Depressive Disorder

“…Data preprocessing was performed using the standard pipeline provided by the DPARSF software [ 29 , 30 ]. Briefly, it included removing the first 10 volumes, slice-timing, head motion realignment, brain tissue segmentation, spatial normalization, temporal filtering (0.01–0.10 Hz), and regressing out the signals from white matter, cerebrospinal fluid, and whole brain as well as the Friston-24 head motion parameters [ 31 , 32 ]. All images have been manually checked by trained researchers to ensure good quality.…”