Shared gray matter reductions across alcohol use disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder in the anterior cingulate cortex: A dual meta-analysis

Abstract

The considerable comorbidity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use disorders (AUD) poses a greater public health burden than either condition alone. Although there is a substantial body of evidence linking the direct neurotoxic effect of heavy drinking to gray matter (GM) deficits, as well as a growing body of literature supporting a strong association between PTSD and GM alterations, there is scant research interrogating the direct interaction of the two disorders. In order to generate data-driven, specific hypotheses regarding the overlapping neural substrates of PTSD and AUD, we conducted a meta-analysis of GM volumes in each disorder relative to healthy control subjects. We found shared GM deficits in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) across both disorders relative to healthy control participants. These findings suggest that reduced volumes of the ACC across PTSD and AUD may have implications for the development, expression, or treatment of symptoms linked to these frequently co-existing disorders. Recommendations are made for future work aimed at delineating the specific and shared effects of traumatic stress and alcoholism on neural integrity.

Meta-analysis of grey matter changes and their behavioral characterization in patients with alcohol use disorder

“…Several reasons might account for these differences. First, the applied methodology: Xiao et al 26 , Yang et al 27 and Klaming et al 28 used effect size based methods (ES-SDM and AES-DM, e.g. 69 ), which makes their strategy different from to the ALE analysis used here.…”

Chronic alcohol causes alteration of lipidome profiling in brain

“…Using the lipidomic analytical approaches, we revealed that some species belonging to GPs were significantly altered in both PFC and striatum of alcohol-exposed rats. GPs are the key components of membrane structure and their composition vary a lot among different cell types, organelles, and inner/outer membranes in mammalian mitochondria due to their divergent biological functions (De et al 2018;Klaming et al 2019). As GPs provide neural membranes with stability, fluidity and permeability, they are required for normal biological function of integral…”

Additive influences of acute early life stress and sex on vulnerability for aversion‐resistant alcohol drinking

“…For these reasons, stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL) in rats exposed to infant or adult trauma has been used as a preclinical model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 23,26 . PTSD and AUD exhibit significant comorbidity in clinical populations, suggesting that the neural substrates mediating vulnerability for these two disorders may be similar [27][28][29][30][31] . While acute stress does increase rodent alcohol consumption in some studies, results are inconsistent 20,32 .…”