Attenuated reward activations associated with cannabis use in anxious/depressed individuals

Abstract

Individuals with mood/anxiety disorders may use cannabis for "self-medication," i.e., to induce positive mood or attenuate aversive mood states. However, little neurobiological evidence supports such use. The goal of this investigation was to test the hypothesis that cannabis use attenuates striatal response to reward in those with mood/ anxiety disorders. Reward-related processing was measured using a monetary incentive delay task under functional MRI. Individuals with any lifetime mood/anxiety disorder diagnoses and problematic cannabis use ("Mood/Anxiety +CB"; n = 41) were compared with a propensity score-matched group of similar subjects without cannabis use ("Mood/Anxiety-CB"; n = 41), and a cannabis-naïve healthy control group (n = 35). Activations during win-and lossanticipations were extracted from bilateral nucleus accumbens, dorsal caudate, and dorsolateral putamen. Mixed models were estimated for each region separately for win-and loss-anticipations, with a test for the main effect of group, condition (e.g., high-win, low-win, neutral), and their interaction. A significant main effect of group for win-and loss-anticipation was observed for each striatal region. Specifically, the Mood/Anxiety+CB group exhibited the lowest striatal activations across condition levels relative to both the Mood/Anxiety-CB and healthy group. A significant group-by-condition interaction was only observed for the dorsolateral putamen and indicated divergent activation modulation as a function of win and loss-magnitude for Mood/Anxiety+CB subjects. Finally, individuals with heavier recent cannabis use showed greater attenuation of gain-related activation in all three striatal regions. There was no such relationship for other illicit drugs. These data support the hypothesis that cannabis use in individuals with mood/ anxiety disorders is associated with attenuated brain processing of reward magnitude, which may contribute to persistent affective symptoms.

Common Data Elements, Scalable Data Management Infrastructure, and Analytics Workflows for Large-Scale Neuroimaging Studies

“…In this work, we provide exemplar results 11 different pipelines (three pipelines on each of two fMRI tasks, four pipelines on resting-state fMRI, and one pipeline on resting EEG) to demonstrate the utility of our infrastructure. Additionally, ROI-level results from our standard pipelines have been used in studies of cannabis ( 29 ) and stimulant/opioid use ( 30 ), while voxelwise results have appeared in studies of neighborhood effects ( 31 ) and inflammation ( 32 ), and clinical data have been used to predict head motion during scanning ( 33 ). We have also used EEG derived features have to differentiate participants with mood and anxiety disorders from healthy controls ( 34 ) and to predict participant age ( 28 ).…”

Common Data Elements, Scalable Data Management Infrastructure and Analytics Workflows for Large-scale Neuroimaging Studies

“…In this work, we provide exemplar results 11 different pipelines (3 pipelines on each of 2 fMRI tasks, 4 pipelines on resting-state fMRI, and one pipeline on resting EEG) to demonstrate the utility of our infrastructure. Additionally, ROI-level results from our standard pipelines have been used in studies of cannabis (Spechler et al, 2020) and stimulant/opioid use (Stewart et al, 2020), while voxelwise results have appeared in studies of neighborhood effects (Feng et al, 2019) and inflammation (Burrows et al, 2021), and clinical data have been used to predict head motion during scanning (Ekhtiari et al, 2019). We have also used EEG derived features have to differentiate participants with mood and anxiety disorders from healthy controls (Al Zoubi et al, 2019) and to predict participant age (Al Zoubi et al, 2018).…”

Down and High: Reflections Regarding Depression and Cannabis

“…Several studies have reported apathy and anhedonia in cannabis users (81)(82)(83), while others failed to detect this phenomenon (84)(85)(86). Decreased cerebral activation in response to reward is reduced in cannabis users, and more so in those with recent heavy CU (87). Although CU may contribute to anhedonia, additional data indicate that anhedonia in adolescence may predispose to CU (88).…”