A preliminary longitudinal study of white matter alteration in cocaine use disorder subjects

Abstract

Background Previous diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have consistently shown that subjects with cocaine use disorder (CocUD) had altered white matter microstructure in the corpus callosum. It is believed that these alterations are due to preexisting factors, chronic cocaine use, or both. However, there is no published longitudinal DTI study on human cocaine users yet which could shed light on the relationship between cocaine use and DTI findings. Methods This study used a longitudinal design and DTI to test if the white matter microstructure shows quicker alteration in CocUD subjects than controls. DTI data were acquired from eleven CocUD subjects who participated a treatment study and eleven non-drug-using controls at baseline (Scan 1) and after ten weeks (Scan 2). The baseline fractional anisotropy (FA), a general measure of white matter microstucture, and the change in FA (ΔFA, equals Scan 1 FA minus Scan 2 FA) were both compared between groups. Results The two groups did not show a difference in FA at baseline. The CocUD subjects had significantly greater ΔFA than the controls in the left splenium of the corpus callosum. In CocUD subjects, greater ΔFA in this region was associated with shorter lifetime cocaine use and greater number of positive cocaine urine samples collected during the treatment. Conclusion The finding in the left splenium is consistent with previous animal studies and provide indirect evidence about the effects of chronic cocaine use on white matter alterations. The subject sample size is small, therefore the results should be treated as preliminary.

Substance abuse and white matter: Findings, limitations, and future of diffusion tensor imaging research

“…Similarly, they found that lifetime cocaine use negatively predicts callosal FA. Together, these studies provide fairly consistent evidence that cocaine abuse negatively impacts white matter microstructure (Ma et al, 2017). Finally, white matter FA also seems to track treatment outcome, with higher FA significantly predicting the number of successful days of abstinence from cocaine (Bell, Foxe, Nierenberg, Hoptman, & Garavan, 2011;Xu et al, 2010).…”

A spatial Bayesian semiparametric mixture model for positive definite matrices with applications in diffusion tensor imaging

“…As several previous studies have revealed that the disease status at proximally located/neighbouring voxels can be similar (see Wu et al, 2013;Xue, Bowman & Kang, 2018), our method is expected to be more clinically meaningful than other studies given that the detected regions are spatially contiguous. Furthermore, our test is able to detect additional regions of differences compared to clinical cocaine dependence studies that rely on FA summaries, such as Ma et al (2017), which did not find these regions despite using the same dataset. The MCMC trace plots and posterior densities of the Potts spatial dependence parameters are displayed in Figure 10.…”

“…We now use our Potts model to analyze the dataset concerning cocaine users (Ma et al, 2017), which we previously described in Section 2. The data were provided by the Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University.…”

“…An important clinical objective of analyzing DTI data is to detect regions of local white matter in the brain that differ between two groups (e.g., normal versus diseased), thereby revealing anatomical structural differences (Lo et al, 2010). For example, the motivating data for this article come from a clinical DTI study (Ma et al, 2017), where the scientific objective is to detect regions that differentiate between cocaine users and non-users.…”

Exploring the relationship between white matter integrity, cocaine use and GAD polymorphisms using Bayesian Model Averaging

“…Cocaine use disorder (CUD) patients exhibit altered white matter integrity versus non-drug using controls [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], with the most consistent findings in the corpus callosum. The altered white matter integrity is particularly evident in CUD patients with greater severity of cocaine use [4].…”