Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 63, Issue 2, 15 January 2008, Pages 184-190
Biological Psychiatry

Original Article
Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Benefit of Predictive Cueing on Response Inhibition in Stimulant Dependent Individuals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2007.04.031Get rights and content

Background

Methamphetamine dependence (MD) is associated with impaired response inhibition and with structural abnormalities and functional hypoactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The need to inhibit behavior is often forewarned by cues that do not call for immediate inhibition. We sought to determine whether such cues would engage the ACC and improve inhibition in MD individuals.

Methods

We used functional MRI to measure ACC activation during performance of a go/nogo response inhibition task in which certain go stimuli (cues) were much more likely than others (noncues) to be followed by nogo trials. Nineteen MD individuals (inpatient treatment, 25–50 days abstinence) were compared with 19 age- and education-matched healthy comparison (HC) subjects.

Results

MD and HC groups had statistically comparable performance, but only MD participants showed an ACC response and lower false alarm rates associated with cues as compared with noncues. Cue-related ACC activity in MD subjects was positively correlated with this cue-related improvement in inhibitory performance.

Conclusions

The ACC, an area associated with error detection and response conflict, may predict the degree to which advance warning may attenuate MD individuals’ difficulty with response inhibition.

Section snippets

Participants

Nineteen MD individuals (17 male) and 19 age- and education-matched HC subjects (16 male) participated in the study, performing the go/nogo task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The MD participants were all treatment-seeking and met criteria for current dependence on methamphetamine as assessed by a psychiatrist, psychologist, or trained research assistant using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (22). All MD individuals had voluntarily entered and completed a

Demographics

There were no significant differences in age, education, NART errors, handedness, race, or gender between the two groups (Table 1).

Task Performance

There were no differences between MD and HC groups on hit rate, beta, or d’ (Table 1). The groups did not differ on the number of false alarms (F (1,36) = 1.90; p = .176), but there was a trend toward an effect of Previous Trial (F (1,36) = 3.63; p = .065) and a significant Group × Previous Trial interaction (F (1,36) = 4.59; p = .04). Follow-up t tests revealed

Discussion

There are two main findings of this investigation: first, MD subjects showed ACC activation in response to cues predicting the need to inhibit responses in a go/nogo task; second, the more MD individuals’ ACCs were activated by such cues the better inhibitory performance was on trials following the cues. There was no cue-related ACC activation in HC subjects, possibly because cueing made no difference to their FA rate, which was low in both cases (∼7%). Methamphetamine dependent subjects, on

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