Cue-induced cocaine craving: neuroanatomical specificity for drug users and drug stimuli.

By Hugh Garavan, J. Pankiewicz, A. Bloom, Jung-Ki Cho, Lori Sperry, Thomas J. Ross, Betty Jo Salmeron, R. Risinger, Dan Kelley, Elliot A. Stein. American Journal of Psychiatry, 2000

959 citations recorded by the source corpus.

OBJECTIVE Cocaine-related cues have been hypothesized to perpetuate drug abuse by inducing a craving response that prompts drug-seeking behavior. However, the mechanisms, underlying neuroanatomy, and specificity of this neuroanatomy are not yet fully understood. METHOD To address these issues, experienced cocaine users (N=17) and comparison subjects (N=14) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while viewing three separate films that portrayed 1 ) individuals smoking crack cocaine, 2) outdoor nature scenes, and 3) explicit sexual content. Candidate craving sites were identified as those that showed significant activation in the cocaine users when viewing the cocaine film. These sites were then required to show significantly greater activation when contrasted with comparison subjects viewing the cocaine film (population specificity) and cocaine users viewing the nature film (content specificity). RESULTS Brain regions that satisfied these criteria were largely left lateralized and included the frontal lobe (medial and middle frontal gyri, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus), parietal lobe (bilateral inferior parietal lobule), insula, and limbic lobe (anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus). Of the 13 regions identified as putative craving sites, just three (anterior cingulate, right inferior parietal lobule, and the caudate/lateral dorsal nucleus) showed significantly greater activation during the cocaine film than during the sex film in the cocaine users, which suggests that cocaine cues activated similar neuroanatomical substrates as naturally evocative stimuli in the cocaine users. Finally, contrary to the effects of the cocaine film, cocaine users showed a smaller response than the comparison subjects to the sex film. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that cocaine craving is not associated with a dedicated and unique neuroanatomical circuitry; instead, unique to the cocaine user is the ability of learned, drug-related cues to produce brain activation comparable to that seen with nondrug evocative stimuli in healthy comparison subjects.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Epidemiology, Toxicology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48c0e64389129c5125b05b9271f621b360384882

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Citations in the corpus

Cue-induced activation of the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex is associated with subsequent relapse in abstinent alcoholics (2004, background): “When cocaine-associated stimuli were presented to cocaine addicts, an activation of the ACC was frequently observed (Maas et al. 1998; Childress et al. 1999; Garavan et al. 2000; Wexler et al. 2001; but see Grant et al. 1996).”
Images of desire: food-craving activation during fMRI (2004, positive): “…blood flow in the anterior cingulate has been reported to be inversely proportional to the desirability of chocolate (Small et al., 2001), and cingulate activation has been reported to be associated with cue-induced cocaine craving (Childress et al., 1999; Garavan et al., 2000; Maas et al., 1998).”
Imaginary relish and exquisite torture: the elaborated intrusion theory of desire. (2005, positive): “Garavan et al. (2000) used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study 13 putative craving sites.”
Drug Addiction as a Pathology of Staged Neuroplasticity (2008, result): “Moreover, consistent with addiction being characterized in part by reduced response to biological rewards, when cocaine addicts were presented with a sexual stimulus, prefrontal activation was significantly impaired compared to controls (Garavan et al, 2000).”
Cocaine seeking habits depend upon dopamine-dependent serial connectivity linking the ventral with the dorsal striatum. (2008, positive): “Thus, the disconnection manipulation should have behavioral effects that are very similar, if not identical, to the consequences of bilateral manipulations of either structure alone within the system (Everitt et al., 1991; Baxter et al., 2000; Han et al., 1997), but will have little or no effect if ”
Resting state functional connectivity in addiction: Lessons learned and a road ahead (2012, background): “These networks are similar to those seen following cocaine cue provocation (Garavan et al., 2000), again suggesting that circuits identified at rest reflect those engaged during active task performance.”
Toward a model of drug relapse: an assessment of the validity of the reinstatement procedure (2006, background): “…include portions of prefrontal cortex, insular cortex, and the amygdala—brain areas also implicated in cue-induced craving for cocaine or alcohol in human neuroimaging studies (Childress et al. 1999; Garavan et al. 2000; Grant et al. 1996; Kilts et al. 2001; Maas et al. 1998; Wexler et al. 2001).”
Addiction related alteration in resting-state brain connectivity (2010, positive): “The neurobiological foundation of these models is mainly based on the results of functional activation studies in human addicts and the observation that exposure to addictive drugs produces persistent structural and functional changes on cells within this network (Garavan et al., 2000; Goldstein et ”
fMRI Reactivity to High-Calorie Food Pictures Predicts Short- and Long-Term Outcome in a Weight-Loss Program (2012, background): “The striatum and insula have also been implicated in both food and drug craving (Garavan et al., 2000; Garavan, 2010; Naqvi et al., 2007; Naqvi and Bechara, 2010; Pelchat et al., 2004).”
Cocaine Cues and Dopamine in Dorsal Striatum: Mechanism of Craving in Cocaine Addiction (2006, background): “Similarly, an fMRI study that compared responses between a neutral and a cocaine video related the enhanced BOLD signaling in dorsal striatum during the cocaine video to the craving induced by the video (Garavan et al., 2000).”
Dysfunction of reward processing correlates with alcohol craving in detoxified alcoholics (2007, background): “The posterior cingulate has previously been implicated in processing of alcohol-and drug-related stimuli (Garavan et al., 2000; Kosten et al., 2006; Tapert et al., 2003) and is thought to function as a rapid relay for incentive valuation and episodic memories (Kosten et al., 2006).”