Allostasis in health and food addiction

Abstract

Homeostasis is the basis of modern medicine and allostasis, a further elaboration of homeostasis, has been defined as stability through change, which was later modified to predictive reference resetting. It has been suggested that pleasure is related to salience (behavioral relevance), and withdrawal has been linked to allostasis in addictive types. The question arises how the clinical and neural signatures of pleasure, salience, allostasis and withdrawal relate, both in a non-addicted and addicted state. Resting state EEGs were performed in 66 people, involving a food-addicted obese group, a non-food addicted obese group and a lean control group. Correlation analyses were performed on behavioral data, and correlation, comparative and conjunction analyses were performed to extract electrophysiological relationships between pleasure, salience, allostasis and withdrawal. Pleasure/liking seems to be the phenomenological expression that enough salient stimuli are obtained, and withdrawal can be seen as a motivational incentive because due to allostatic reference resetting, more stimuli are required. In addition, in contrast to non-addiction, a pathological, non-adaptive salience attached to food results in withdrawal mediated through persistent allostatic reference resetting.

The neural correlates of the unified percept of alcohol-related craving: a fMRI and EEG study

“…Alcohol dependence is an example of a learned response where the initial hedonic weight associated with alcohol is decreased due to excessive consumption of the substance 22 . This is proposed to result in a change in internal reference state from a normal to an addicted state, characterized by increased goal-directed attention or incentive salience towards its consumption 11 , 13 . The increased BOLD signal in the amygdala, PHC, NAcc and striatum on viewing pictures of alcoholic beverages as opposed to non-alcoholic beverages in the present study may be characteristic of the associative learning of substance abuse and the paradoxical reward associated with it 23 .…”

“…allostasis. PCC is an important node in the default mode network and is shown to encode the allostatic shift to an addicted state in other substance addiction disorders 11 , 13 . The incentive salience to an otherwise neutral stimulus is hypothesized to be the component that drives the pathological craving of the substance.…”

“…This may be compensated for by consumption of more alcohol to achieve the same pleasure. However, in substance addiction, salience may lead to a change in the internal state of the subject to a new pathological “addicted” state 11 . This pathological state is proposed to be one in which the reward system is suppressed and is hence incompetent to compensate for the salience, thus triggering pathological craving 12 .…”

“…This pathological state is proposed to be one in which the reward system is suppressed and is hence incompetent to compensate for the salience, thus triggering pathological craving 12 . This shift in self-referential state is called allostasis and may reflect the brain maladaptively compensating for the dysfunctional reward system 11 , 13 .…”

Distress‐dependent temporal variability of regions encoding domain‐specific and domain‐general behavioral manifestations of phantom percepts

“…We observe that sensory deafferentation changes the dynamics of both unimodal regions (e.g., auditory cortex) and multimodal areas (i.e., parahippocampus) in diametrically opposing directions which relate key physiological features (search for compensatory information and hard‐wiring of regions) with behavioral symptoms (loudness and distress). This can explain the dynamics of other pathologies such as chronic pain and addiction, which are also hypothesized to be a maladaptive compensation to salient stimuli (De Ridder, Joos, & Vanneste, ; De Ridder, Manning, Leong, Ross, & Vanneste, ; De Ridder, Vanneste, Weisz, et al., ; De Ridder, Vanneste, & Freeman, ; De Ridder, Manning, Leong, Ross, Sutherland, et al., ). Further, the results of the current study can also be extrapolated to disorders characterized by patients stuck in a particular state such as depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and can explain why some of these disorders may presently not have a cure.…”