Decreased brain connectivity in smoking contrasts with increased connectivity in drinking
- Fudan University, China
- University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Xidian University, China
- Shanghai University Finance and Economics, China
- University of Warwick, United Kingdom
- Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- King's College London, United Kingdom
- University of Vermont, United States
- University Paris Descartes, France
- Université Paris-Saclay, France
- Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
- University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China
Abstract
In a group of 831 participants from the general population in the Human Connectome Project, smokers exhibited low overall functional connectivity, and more specifically of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex which is associated with non-reward mechanisms, the adjacent inferior frontal gyrus, and the precuneus. Participants who drank a high amount had overall increases in resting state functional connectivity, and specific increases in reward-related systems including the medial orbitofrontal cortex and the cingulate cortex. Increased impulsivity was found in smokers, associated with decreased functional connectivity of the non-reward-related lateral orbitofrontal cortex; and increased impulsivity was found in high amount drinkers, associated with increased functional connectivity of the reward-related medial orbitofrontal cortex. The main findings were cross-validated in an independent longitudinal dataset with 1176 participants, IMAGEN. Further, the functional connectivities in 14-year-old non-smokers (and also in female low-drinkers) were related to who would smoke or drink at age 19. An implication is that these differences in brain functional connectivities play a role in smoking and drinking, together with other factors.
Data availability
The dataset used in this study and custom code is available at Dryad.
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Data from: Decreased brain connectivity in smoking contrasts with increased connectivity in drinkingDryad Digital Repository, doi.org/10.5061/dryad.736t01r.
Article and author information
Author details
Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (71661167002)
- Jianfeng Feng
The Key Project of Shanghai Science & Technology Innovation Plan (16JC1420402)
- Jianfeng Feng
National Natural Science Foundation of China (81701773)
- Wei Cheng
Shanghai Sailing Program (17YF1426200)
- Wei Cheng
Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (18ZR1404400)
- Wei Cheng
The Key Project of Shanghai Science & Technology Innovation Plan (15JC1400101)
- Jianfeng Feng
The Shanghai AI Platform for Diagnosis and Treatment of Brain Diseases (2016-17)
- Jianfeng Feng
Base for Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (B18015)
- Jianfeng Feng
National Natural Science Foundation of China (91630314)
- Jianfeng Feng
National Natural Science Foundation of China (11771010)
- Wei Cheng
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The WU-Minn HCP Consortium obtained full informed consent from all participants, and research procedures and ethical guidelines were followed in accordance with the Washington University Institutional Review Boards (IRB #201204036; Title: 'Mapping the Human Connectome: Structure, Function, and Heritability').
Copyright
© 2019, Cheng et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Decreased brain connectivity in smoking contrasts with increased connectivity in drinking
eLife 8:e40765.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40765
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