No abstract

Internet gaming disorder (IGD) may lead to many negative consequences in everyday life, yet there is currently no effective treatment for IGD. Cue-reactivity paradigm is commonly used to evaluate craving for substance, food, and gambling; cue exposure therapy (CET) is applied to treating substance use disorders (SUDs) and some other psychological disorders such as pathological gambling (PG). However, no study has explored CET’s application to the treatment of IGD except two articles having implied that cues’ exposure may have therapeutic effect on IGD. This paper reviews studies on cue-induced behavioral and neural changes in excessive Internet gamers, indicating that behavioral and neural mechanisms of IGD mostly overlap with those of SUD. The CET’s effects in the treatment of SUDs and PG are also reviewed. We finally propose an optimized CET paradigm, which future studies should consider and investigate as a probable treatment of IGD.

Most previous studies of brain responses to acupuncture were designed to investigate the acupuncture instant effect while the cumulative effect that should be more important in clinical practice has seldom been discussed. In this study, the neural basis of the acupuncture cumulative effect was analyzed. For this experiment, forty healthy volunteers were recruited, in which more than 40 minutes of repeated acupuncture stimulation was implemented at acupoint Zhusanli (ST36). Three runs of acupuncture fMRI datasets were acquired, with each run consisting of two blocks of acupuncture stimulation. Besides general linear model (GLM) analysis, the cumulative effects of acupuncture were analyzed with analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to find the association between the brain response and the cumulative duration of acupuncture stimulation in each stimulation block. The experimental results showed that the brain response in the initial stage was the strongest although the brain response to acupuncture was time-variant. In particular, the brain areas that were activated in the first block and the brain areas that demonstrated cumulative effects in the course of repeated acupuncture stimulation overlapped in the pain-related areas, including the bilateral middle cingulate cortex, the bilateral paracentral lobule, the SII, and the right thalamus. Furthermore, the cumulative effects demonstrated bimodal characteristics, i.e. the brain response was positive at the beginning, and became negative at the end. It was suggested that the cumulative effect of repeated acupuncture stimulation was consistent with the characteristic of habituation effects. This finding may explain the neurophysiologic mechanism underlying acupuncture analgesia.

Addicts are often vulnerable to drug use in the presence of drug cues, which elicit significant drug cue reactivity. Mounting neuroimaging evidence suggests an association between functional magnetic resonance imaging connectivity networks and smoking cue reactivity; however, there is still little understanding of the electroencephalography (EEG) coherence basis of smoking cue reactivity. We therefore designed two independent experiments wherein nicotine-dependent smokers performed a smoking cue reactivity task during EEG recording. Experiment I showed that a low-theta EEG coherence network occurring 400–600 ms after onset during long-range (mainly between frontal and parieto-occipital) scalp regions, which was involved in smoking cue reactivity. Moreover, the average coherence of this network was significantly correlated with participants’ level of cigarette craving. In experiment II, we tested an independent group of smokers and demonstrated that the low-theta coherence network significantly predicted changes in individuals’ cigarette craving. Thus, the low-theta EEG coherence in smokers’ brains might be a biomarker of smoking cue reactivity and can predict addiction behavior.