The neural correlates of priming emotion and reward systems for conflict processing in alcoholics

Abstract

Emotional dysregulation in alcoholism (ALC) may result from disturbed inhibitory mechanisms. We therefore tested emotion and alcohol cue reactivity and inhibitory processes using negative priming. To test the neural correlates of cue reactivity and negative priming, 26 ALC and 26 age-matched controls underwent functional MRI performing a Stroop color match-to-sample task. In cue reactivity trials, task-irrelevant emotion and alcohol-related pictures were interspersed between color samples and color words. In negative priming trials, pictures primed the semantic content of an alcohol or emotion Stroop word. Behaviorally, both groups showed response facilitation to picture cue trials and response inhibition to primed trials. For cue reactivity to emotion and alcohol pictures, ALC showed midbrain-limbic activation. By contrast, controls activated frontoparietal executive control regions. Greater midbrain-hippocampal activation in ALC correlated with higher amounts of lifetime alcohol consumption and higher anxiety. With negative priming, ALC exhibited frontal cortical but not midbrain-hippocampal activation, similar to the pattern observed in controls. Higher frontal activation to alcohol-priming correlated with less craving and to emotion-priming with fewer depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that neurofunctional systems in ALC can be primed to deal with upcoming emotion- and alcohol-related conflict and can overcome the prepotent midbrain-limbic cue reactivity response.

Investigation of brain functional connectivity to assess cognitive control over cue‐processing in Alcohol Use Disorder

“…Expanding on findings made by Schulte and colleagues 29 , our study demonstrates that neural activation is not the only measurable functional parameter sensitive to alcohol‐associated stimuli which also correlates with clinical measures including subjective craving and severity of alcohol use. Confirming our hypothesis, we observed correlations between functional connectivity change during alcohol cue‐exposure and both ratings of subjective craving and OCDS scores.…”

“…To achieve these aims, we analyzed samples from prior investigations, including healthy controls and chronic alcohol users 1,21 , as well as recently detoxified patients 22,23 . As seed regions of interest for the PPI analyses, we chose the striatum and insula since both have consistently been activated by cue-reactivity tasks 1,20,[24][25][26][27][28][29] and their importance is supported by earlier PPI studies 13,14,16,18,19 .…”

Brain-behavior relations and effects of aging and common comorbidities in alcohol use disorder: A review.

“…While performing a spatial working memory task, alcoholics activated the frontotemporal regions, representing the “ventral stream” of processing typically used for remembering verbal material (Ungerleider, Courtney, & Haxby, 1998), unlike the controls, who activated frontoparietal regions, representing the “dorsal stream” typically used for processing spatial information (Pfefferbaum et al, 2001). Alcoholism-related differences in activation of frontostriatal systems and sites have been detected with reward (Alba-Ferrara, Muller-Oehring, Sullivan, Pfefferbaum, & Schulte, 2016) and response inhibition (Claus, Feldstein Ewing, Filbey, & Hutchison, 2013; Courtney, Ghahremani, & Ray, 2013; Hommer, Bjork, & Gilman, 2011; Hu, Ide, Zhang, Sinha, & Li, 2015; Schuckit et al, 2012; Schulte et al, 2017).…”

Anxiety during abstinence from alcohol: A systematic review of rodent and human evidence for the anterior insula's role in the abstinence network

“…Studies of anterior insula function show that abstinent patients with AUD have heightened anterior insula activity during anticipation and presentation of drug‐related cues, known as cue‐reactivity. Heightened cue‐reactivity has been shown in abstinent patients with recent history of alcohol dependence 85,85 although exceptions exist (eg, Huang et al 87 ). In abstinent AUD patients, insula activation to alcohol cue presentation was also positively correlated with faster reaction times 85 …”