Importance: Heroin addiction and related mortality impose a devastating toll on society, with little known about the neurobiology of this disease or its treatment. Poor inhibitory control is a common manifestation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) impairments in addiction, and its potential recovery following treatment is largely unknown in heroin (or any drug) addiction.
Objective: To study inhibitory control brain activity in iHUD and HC, before and after 15 weeks of inpatient treatment in the former.
Design: A longitudinal cohort study (11/2020-03/2022) where iHUD and HC underwent baseline and follow-up fMRI scans. Average follow-up duration: 15 weeks.
Setting: The iHUD and HC were recruited from treatment facilities and surrounding neighborhoods, respectively.
Participants: Twenty-six iHUD [40.6±10.1 years; 7 (29.2%) women] and 24 age-/sex-matched HC [41.1±9.9 years; 9 (37.5%) women].
Intervention: Following the baseline scan, inpatient iHUD continued to participate in a medically-assisted program for an average of 15 weeks (abstinence increased from an initial 183±236 days by 65±82 days). The HC were scanned at similar time intervals.
Main outcomes and measures: Behavioral performance as measured by the stop-signal response time (SSRT), target detection sensitivity (d', proportion of hits in go vs. false-alarms in stop trials), and brain activity (blood-oxygen level dependent signal differences) during successful vs. failed stops in the stop signal task.
Results: As we previously reported, at time 1 and as compared to HC, iHUD exhibited similar SSRT but impaired d' [t(38.7)=2.37, p=.023], and lower anterior and dorsolateral PFC (aPFC, dlPFC) activity (p<.001). Importantly, at time 2, there were significant gains in aPFC and dlPFC activity in the iHUD (group*session interaction, p=.002); the former significantly correlated with increases in d' specifically in iHUD (p=.012).
Conclusions and relevance: Compared to HC, the aPFC and dlPFC impairments in the iHUD at time 1 were normalized at time 2, which was associated with individual differences in improvements in target detection sensitivity. For the first time in any drug addiction, these results indicate a treatment-mediated inhibitory control brain activity recovery. These neurobehavioral results highlight the aPFC and dlPFC as targets for intervention with a potential to enhance self-control recovery in heroin addiction.