Abnormal white matter tracts of insula in smokers
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Abnormal white matter tracts of insula in smokers Chao Wang 1 & Shuyue Wang 1 & Peiyu Huang 1 & Zhujing Shen 1 & Wei Qian 1 & Xiao Luo 1 & Kaicheng Li 1 & Qingze Zeng 1 & Quanquan Gu 1 & Hualiang Yu 2 & Yihong Yang 3 & Minming Zhang 1 Accepted: 31 August 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Nicotine addiction is characterized as a neural circuit dysfunction, particularly with regard to the alterations in central reward pathways. The insula, a cortical region that is thought to play a central role in this reward circuitry, has been implicated in the maintenance of nicotine addiction. However, it remains largely unclear about the white matter (WM) microstructural alterations of insula in nicotine addiction and whether the WM alterations of insula could predict smoking cessation outcomes. In this study, 58 male nicotine-dependent smokers and 34 matched male nonsmoking controls were recruited. After a 12-week smoking cessation treatment with varenicline, 38 smokers relapsed, and 20 did not relapse. Diffusion tensor imaging and probabilistic tractography were used to investigate the differences of WM tracts of insula between smokers and nonsmokers. Relative to nonsmokers, in the left hemisphere, smokers showed lower fractional anisotropy (FA) in the fiber tracts of anterior insula cortexto-nucleus accumbens and posterior insula cortex-to-nucleus accumbens; in the right hemisphere, smokers showed higher FA, and lower axial diffusivity (AD), radial diffusivity (RD), and mean diffusivity (MD) in the fiber tracts of anterior insula cortex-tomedial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior insula cortex-to-medial orbitofrontal cortex, and posterior insula cortex-to-nucleus accumbens. However, there were no differences of WM diffusion properties between relapsers and nonrelapsers. This study is the first using probabilistic tractography to exclusively clarify the precise roles of insular WM tracts in smokers, which may provide new insights into the underlying neurobiology of nicotine addiction. Keywords Nicotine . Insula . White matter . Diffusion tensor imaging
Introduction
Chao Wang and Shuyue Wang contributed equally to this work. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-020-00389-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Chao Wang [email protected] * Peiyu Huang [email protected] * Minming Zhang [email protected] 1
Department of Radiology, the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China
2
Department of Psychiatry, the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China
3
Neuroimaging Research Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
Cigarette smoking, one of the biggest threats to human health, is responsible for 6 million preventable deaths annually (Chen et al., 2015). Seventy percent of smokers report that they want to quit, and appr
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