Shared orbitofrontal dynamics to a drug-themed movie track craving and recovery in heroin addiction

• Published in: Brain (London, England : 1878) England : 1878), 2024-11
• Main Authors: Kronberg, Greg, Ceceli, Ahmet O, Huang, Yuefeng, Gaudreault, Pierre-Olivier, King, Sarah G, McClain, Natalie, Alia-Klein, Nelly, Goldstein, Rita Z
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0006-8950; 1460-2156; 1460-2156
• DOI: 10.1093/brain/awae369

Movies captivate groups of individuals (the audience), especially if they contain themes of common motivational interest to the group. In drug addiction, a key mechanism is maladaptive motivational salience attribution whereby drug cues outcompete other reinforcers within the same environment or context. We predicted that while watching a drug-themed movie, where cues for drugs and other stimuli share a continuous narrative context, fMRI responses in individuals with heroin use disorder (iHUD) will preferentially synchronize during drug scenes. Thirty inpatient iHUD (24 male) and 25 healthy controls (16 male) watched a drug-themed movie at baseline and at follow-up after 15 weeks. Results revealed such drug-biased synchronization in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), ventromedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and insula. After 15 weeks during ongoing inpatient treatment, there was a significant reduction in this drug-biased shared response in the OFC, which correlated with a concomitant reduction in dynamically-measured craving, suggesting synchronized OFC responses to a drug-themed movie as a neural marker of craving and recovery in iHUD.