Differential Intrinsic Neural Activities Between Sober And Intoxicated States

Previous neuroimaging studies mainly focused on the effects of alcohol intoxication on various cognitive tasks, but how alcohol intoxication affects the brain mechanism at the resting state still remains unclear. The present study aims to investigate the acute effects of alcohol intoxication on the resting state of brain mechanism of healthy social drinkers by using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Forty-six healthy social drinkers attended the present study. Having adopted the double-blind and placebo-control design, the study included two separate session, which asked participants to drink either orange juice (placebo condition, PC) or alcohol-juice mixed beverage (alcohol condition, AC) respectively and then took a ten-minute resting fMRI scan. The results showed significant difference in both local resting-state neural activity as well as between-region functional connectivity between AC and PC, by using the DPARSF and REST toolboxes. In specific, the Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuation of Inferior Temporal Gyrus, Superior Frontal Gyrus and Inferior Frontal Gyrus were found increased while Precuneus and bilateral lobule VI decreased after drinking, compared with the PC. The Regional Homogeneity of Right Anterior Insula, Anterior cingulate cortex, Frontal Insula were found increased while Primary Motor cortex, Premotor cortex and Medial prefrontal cortex decreased after alcohol intoxication, compared with the PC. Moreover, The Functional Connectivity analysis showed that negative correlation between Hippocampus and Precuneus increased, whereas the negative correlation between Posterior cingulate cortex and Right Lobule VIIIA decreased and that the positive correlation between Medial prefrontal cortex and Inferior Parietal Lobule decreased, all after drinking alcohol in contrast to the PC.In sum, the current study not only showed that alcohol intoxication had acute effects on resting-state brain mechanism in the healthy people for the first time, but also provided clues for further investigation on the effect of alcohol on tasked related neural correlates as well as alcohol addiction.