Reduction in N2 amplitude in response to deviant drug-related stimuli during a two-choice oddball task in long-term heroin abstainers

Abstract

Rationale Chronic heroin use can cause deficits in response inhibition, leading to a loss of control over drug use, particularly in the context of drug-related cues. Unfortunately, heightened incentive salience and motivational bias in response to drug-related cues may exist following abstinence from heroin use.Objectives The present study aimed to examine the effect of drug-related cues on response inhibition in long-term heroin abstainers.Methods Sixteen long-term (8-24 months) male heroin abstainers and 16 male healthy controls completed a modified two-choice oddball paradigm, in which a neutral "chair" picture served as frequent standard stimuli, the neutral and drug-related pictures served as infrequent deviant stimuli of different conditions respectively. Event-related potentials were compared across groups and conditions.Results Our results showed that heroin abstainers exhibited smaller N2d amplitude (deviant minus standard) in the drug cue condition compared to the neutral condition, due to smaller drug-cue deviant-N2 amplitude compared to neutral deviant-N2. Moreover, heroin abstainers had smaller N2d amplitude compared with the healthy controls in the drug cue condition, due to the heroin abstainers having reduced deviant-N2 amplitude compared to standard-N2 in the drug cue condition, which reversed in the healthy controls.Conclusions Our findings suggested that heroin addicts still show response inhibition deficits specifically for drug-related cues after longer-term abstinence. The inhibition-related N2 modulation for drug-related could be used as a novel electrophysiological index with clinical implications for assessing the risk of relapse and treatment outcome for heroin users.

Effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement Versus Social Support on Negative Affective Interference During Inhibitory Control Among Opioid-Treated Chronic Pain Patients: A Pilot Mechanistic Study

“…Moreover, chronic opioid use and opioid dependence are associated with diminished cognitive control functions, including deficits in response inhibition [16][17][18][19], which can persist beyond cessation of and withdrawal from opioid use [20,21]. Opioid-dependent individuals exhibit attenuated inhibitory control-related fMRI BOLD signal in medial prefrontal circuitry, including the anterior cingulate cortex [22,23] and medial prefrontal cortex [24], and have worse behavioral performance compared with nonopioid-dependent persons across a broad range of task probes of response inhibition including the arrow task [25], the standard Go/NoGo task [22], and the affective Go/NoGo task [26].…”

Forging Neuroimaging Targets for Recovery in Opioid Use Disorder

“…In contrast, however, former OUD and cocaine users display no N200 differences from non-users during response inhibition tasks involving neutral and emotional stimuli (114). OUD users abstinent at least 1 month show greater N200 amplitude to opioid images during a dot probe task than controls (115), in contrast, OUD users abstinent 8–24 months exhibit smaller N200 to opioid images than healthy subjects (108). These results suggest that addicted individuals experience inhibitory difficulties in the presence of drug cues as represented by the Preoccupation/Anticipation stage of addiction that may change as a function of prolonged recovery.…”

Acute Aerobic Exercise Ameliorates Cravings and Inhibitory Control in Heroin Addicts: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials and Frequency Bands

“…Moreover, neuroimaging studies have further demonstrated that, relative to healthy groups, heroin addict groups exhibit abnormal structures and lower levels of activation in brain regions related to inhibitory control during the Go/No-Go task, including impairments in the bilateral medial prefrontal gyrus, bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DPFC), left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and left insular and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Fu et al, 2008;Luijten et al, 2014;Moningka et al, 2018). Inhibitory control failure and associated brain dysfunction are key underlying factors of relapse and addiction (Su et al, 2017). Therefore, inhibitory control may be an important factor related to aerobic exercise in reducing the risk of relapse in heroin addicts.…”

“…The vast majority of electroencephalogram (EEG) studies have characterized inhibitory control dysfunction in heroin addicts using event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with the Go/No-Go task (Morie et al, 2014;Steele et al, 2014;Yang et al, 2015;Su et al, 2017). These studies have shown that the N2 component is sensitive in measuring the dysfunction of heroin addicts under No-Go conditions.…”

“…The N2 can reflect features of conflict monitoring; features of cognitive control processing (Falkenstein, 2006;Folstein and Van Petten, 2008;Groom and Cragg, 2015), which is a top-down cognitive mechanism in the early stages of inhibitory control; and a reduction in the N2 amplitude during the No-Go task, which is a sensitive indicator of impaired inhibition in heroin addicts (Morie et al, 2014;Su et al, 2017). Moreover, to more clearly highlight the effects on inhibitory control processing that were mentioned above, N2d, which is defined as the difference in signals from the No-Go trials and those from the Go trials, is widely used (Cao et al, 2017;Su et al, 2017). In addition to the ERP components mentioned above that are related to inhibitory control, the changes in spectral power that occur with performance in the Go/No-Go task have also been studied by many researchers.…”