United States: “This is your brain on drugs,” it said in the past, and now a study showed that it was true to an extent.
Brain Changes
MRI scans show that opioid addicts go through structural and functional alterations in the chosen areas of their brains.
It is crucial to study these shifts as more than 2.5 million adults in the United States suffer from opioid use disorder, as researchers pointed out. Opioids were involved in overdose deaths, which were more than 81,000 cases in the year 2023, as reported by HealthDay.
MRI Scans Expose Changes in Key Brain Regions
‘It could help us to comprehend in detail what could have brought about these alterations in order to come up with the treatment targets,’ said researcher Dr. Saloni Mehta, a post-doctoral fellow at the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging.
The study was carried out on December 10 in the journal Radiology, where the team used the MRI scans of the opioid dependents and the non-dependents who have taken scans between February 2021 and May 2023.
In fact, researchers focused on structural Imaging data for 103 participants, including opioid addicts and 105 non-addicts), while 74 addicts and 100 controls underwent Functional Imaging.
Functional MRI scans can measure brain activity through blood oxygen level-dependent, and structural MRI scans provide definitive shapes of certain regions in the brain.
The scans revealed tissue alterations in areas of the brain densely packed with opioid receptors, said the researchers.
A few areas, such as the thalamus and right medial temporal lobe, were atrophied in opioid addicts, while areas such as the cerebellum and brain stem were hyper-trophied.
These brain regions also seemed to increase the coupling strength between them, said researchers.
Gender Differences in Brain Changes
The results also revealed certain disparities between male and female participants with reference to changes in the brain due to opioid use.
“Previous studies have been performed on small sample sizes, many of which included no women,” Mehta explained in a journal news release. “Ours is a moderate sample size, approximately half of which is female.”
“We found that alteration patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex — a core region involved in many mental health conditions — were different between men and women in the group with opioid use disorder,” Mehta added. “This highlights the importance of assessing sex differences in opioid use disorder neuro-imaging studies.”
As these differences have been identified, researchers will consider what it implies and how it may serve to predict a person’s behavior, according to Mehta.
Future Directions in Opioid Research
Future research also needs to determine whether or not these brain alterations are irreversible or whether the alterations become stable and decrease as soon as a particular individual is treated for the addiction, as given by Roberts.
“Our eventual goal is to examine how brain alterations in individuals with opioid use disorder may be linked to outcome measures,” Mehta said, as reported by HealthDay.