• Wei Wang, Ya-rong Wang, Wei Qin, Kai Yuan, Jie Tian, Qiang Li, Lan-ying Yang, Lin Lu, and You-min Guo.
• Molecular Imaging Center, First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shannxi 710061, China.
• Chin. Med. J. 2010 Jun 1; 123 (12): 1582-8.

BackgroundPrevious studies with animal experiments, autopsy, structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and task-related functional MRI (fMRI) have confirmed that brain functional connectivity in addicts has become impaired. The goal of this study was to investigate the alteration of resting-state functional connectivity of the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC) in the heroin abusers' brain.MethodsFifteen heroin abusers and fifteen matched healthy volunteers were studied using vACC as the region-of interest (ROI) seed. A 3.0 T scanner with a standard head coil was the imagining apparatus. T2*-weighted gradient-echo planar imaging (GRE-EPI) was the scanning protocol. A ROI seed based correlation analysis used a SPM5 software package as the tool for all images processing.ResultsThis study showed a functional connection to the insula vACC in heroin abusers. Compared with controls, heroin users showed decreased functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and vACC, between the parahippocampala gyrus/amgdala (PHC/amygdala) and vACC, between the thalamus and vACC, and between the posterior cingulated cortex/precuneus (PCC/pC) and vACC.ConclusionThe altered resting-state functional connectivity to the vACC suggests the neural circuitry on which the addictive drug has an affect and reflects the dysfunction of the addictive brain.

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