A fMRI study on electroacupuncture intervening heroin abstainers' cognitive attention

Abstract

Objective: To observe heroin abstainers' cerebral functional changes of cognitive attention on the heroinrelated cue, positive and negative emotional cues before and after electroacupuncture intervention, and to explore the possibly involved neural mechanism in relapse and central principles of electroacupuncture intervention. Methods: Magnetic resonance imaging technique as well as Block and Dot-probe event-related stimulating modes were used to compare and analyze images obtained from fMRI-BOLD technique before and after electroacupuncture intervention. Results: In the attention shift task, significantly stronger activation intensity was shown in the dorsolateral frontal cortexes, inferior frontal gyri, anterior cingulate cortexes and left corpus striatum after electroacupuncture treatment. In the attentional bias task, after electroacupuncture treatment, the activation volume of the dorsolateral areas of the left frontal lobe decreased significantly, and the activation intensity of the right superior parietal lobule increased. Conclusions: Heroin abstainers showed significantly higher attentional bias to visual drug-related cue than to positive and negative emotional cues, and they had higher attentional bias to the processing of negative emotion than to the positive emotional cue. Electroacupuncture intervention could obviously lower the attention level of heroin abstainers to the drug-related cue, inhibit the susceptibility of heroin abstainers to negative emotion and promote the rehabilitation of cognitive function of emotion of the brain. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.