INVESTIGADORES
ALBA FERRARA lucia M
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
SOBRIETY LENGTH AND LIFETIME ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION MODULATES BRAIN RESPONSE TO EMOTIONAL SALIENCE AND REWARD IN ABSTINENT ALCOHOLICS
Autor/es:
ALBA FERRARA, L.; MULLER-OEHRING, E.; CHU, W.; SCHULTE, T.
Lugar:
BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON
Reunión:
Congreso; 37th Annual RSA Scientific Meeting; 2014
Institución organizadora:
RESEARCH SOCIETY ON ALCOHOLISM
Resumen:
BACKGROUND: Emotional processing has a major impact in most aspects of people?s life, as it is present in every social interaction. Alcoholic patients often present deficits in processing facial emotion (Maurage, Campanella, Philippot, Martin, & De Timary, 2008) and such deficits may result in impaired interpersonal interaction, impoverishment social life and isolation, contributing to the maintenance of alcohol abuse. Paradoxically, alcohol-related stimuli seem to gain emotional relevance due to associations with their psychotropic rewarding effects (Houben & Wiers, 2006), leading alcoholic patients to drink. At the neural level, activation of a mesocorticolimbic pathway implicated in emotional processing promotes alcohol-seeking behavior (Hill, Zezza, Wipprecht, Locke, & Neiswanger, 1999), and this same pathway is suppressed in alcoholic patients when viewing aversive emotional stimuli (Charlet et al., 2013). AIM: The present research aims to clarify the role of the mesocorticolimbic pathway in processing emotional faces and alcoholic beverages in alcoholism, and how its metabolic response to these stimuli is impacted by sobriety length and lifetime alcohol consumption. METHODS: To test the neurofunctional correlates of facial emotion and alcohol-related picture processing, 10 sober alcoholics (ALC) and 11 social drinking controls (CTL) underwent task-activated functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) during which pictures of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, and of emotional faces (happy, sad, and angry) were presented for 5 sec with 500 ms interstimulus-interval using a blocked design; each picture block was repeated 3 times (block=33sec, TR=2.2sec). Whole-brain imaging data were acquired at a 3T GE scanner. ANALYSIS: A random effects analysis was conducted with SPM8, where one image per contrast was computed for each subject and subjected to t-tests for group comparison. By spatially restricting the analysis to an anatomically defined mesocorticolimbic mask, we carried out a hypothesis driven study focusing on a circuitry known to be relevant to the processing of emotion and reward (Smith, Tindell, Aldridge, & Berridge, 2009). We calculated BOLD activation patterns from two t-contrasts of interest: a) ?Alcoholic vs. Non-Alcoholic beverages? (A-NA) and b) ?Emotional faces vs. Alcoholic beverages? (E-A). In addition, conjunction analyses tested for regional activation overlap of both groups for emotional face and alcoholic beverage processing. RESULTS: BOLD t-contrasts showed that both groups activated fusiform gyrus more for emotional faces than alcohol pictures, and activated hippocampal and pallidum regions during alcohol picture processing (pFWE corr