The neural activities of similarities and differences in substance and behavioral addictions: A meta-analysis based on task types

Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2024-06-05

HE, Quanxing LI, Zhaolan YANG, Haibo

Abstract： According to the dual-system theory of addiction, both substance and behavioral addictions are caused by the interaction between the reflective system represented by the prefrontal cortex and the impulsive system represented by the striatum. However, while most current studies examine the changes in the reflective and impulsive systems of substance and behavioral addictions separately, the overall understanding of these under different tasks remains incomplete. There is a need for further exploration of the commonalities and differences in the neural mechanisms between different types of addictions. Therefore, the current study used meta-analysis to investigate the neural activation patterns of substance and behavioral addictions in three types of tasks: inhibition control, reward processing, and craving induction. Then, contrast analysis was used to evaluate the similarities and differences in neural activation patterns of substance and behavioral addictions in these three tasks. The current study used activation likelihood estimation (ALE) to conduct a meta-analysis of neuroimaging data. The substance addiction included 22 inhibition control tasks, 9 reward processing tasks, and 17 craving induction tasks. The behavioral addiction included 15 inhibition control tasks, 22 reward processing tasks, and 12 craving induction tasks. The meta-analysis was conducted in the standard Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space, and GingerALE (3.0.2) was used to convert the Talairach coordinates obtained in the studies to MNI coordinates. The probability maps used p < 0.001 (Uncorrected) as threshold. The minimum cluster size was set at 250 mm3. Finally, under the three different tasks, contrast analysis was performed on substance and behavioral addictions. Group similarities and differences were examined using contrast analyses. The threshold for group-contrasts was set to p < 0.01 uncorrected for multiple comparisons with 10000 permutations, and the minimum cluster size was greater than 50mm3. The results found that: (1) In inhibition control tasks, substance addictions and behavioral addictions do not have the same activated brain areas; however, substance addictions exhibit decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while behavioral addictions show increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. (2) In cue-induced craving tasks, both substance addictions and behavioral addictions showed increased activation in the inferior frontal gyrus. (3) In reward processing tasks, substance addictions exhibit stronger activation in the striatum than behavioral addictions. In summary, the current meta-analysis shows that substance addictions and behavioral addictions exhibit differences and similarities in neural mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex and striatum in inhibition control, cue-induced craving, and reward processing tasks. In the striatum system, although substance addiction showed stronger activation increase than behavioral addiction in reward-related tasks, both substance and behavioral addictions showed abnormal activation increase. However, in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, behavioral addiction only showed a substance addiction-like response when induced by addictive cues; in inhibition control, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation decreased in substance addiction, while it increased in behavioral addiction, allowing behavioral addiction to meet task requirements through compensatory activation.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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