The complexity of cortical folding is reduced in chronic cocaine users

Abstract

Cocaine use is a worldwide health problem with psychiatric, somatic and socioeconomic complications, being the second most widely used illicit drug in the world. Despite several structural neuroimaging studies, the alterations in cortical morphology associated with cocaine use and addiction are still poorly understood. In this study, we compared the complexity of cortical folding (CCF), a measure that aims to summarize the convoluted structure of the cortex between patients with cocaine addiction (n = 52) and controls (n = 36), and correlated it with characteristics of addiction and impulsivity. We found that patients with cocaine addiction had greater impulsivity and showed reduced CCF in a cluster that encompassed the left insula and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) and in one in the left medial orbitofrontal cortex.Finally, the CCF in the left medial orbitofrontal cortex was correlated with the age of onset of cocaine addiction and with attentional impulsivity. Overall, our findings suggest that chronic cocaine use is associated with changes in the cortical surface in the fronto-parieto-limbic regions that underlie emotional regulation and these changes are associated with earlier cocaine use. Future longitudinal studies are warranted to unravel the association of these changes with the diathesis for the disorder and with the chronic use of this substance.

The cortical thickness of tricenarian cocaine users assembles features of an octogenarian brain

“…They are situated on the lateral surface, inferior to Broadmann Area (BA) 9 and adjacent to BA46, integrating the executive control network involved in response inhibition, working memory, and executive function processes (McKenna et al., 2017). OFC atrophy was described in both cocaine‐related (Trevisan et al., 2023) and age‐related brain alterations (Resnick et al., 2007), and reduction in pars triangularis metabolism has been associated with the amount and duration of drug use in polysubstance users (Moreno‐Lopez et al., 2012). Corroborating with our present results, we also demonstrate that chronic cocaine use was progressively implicated in decreasing the white matter in intrahemispheric connections of the BA9 (Tondo et al., 2021).…”