| Heroin addiction as a chronic brain disorders, is associated with several brain circuits, i.e. control, memory, reward and drive circuits. Emerging neuroimaging studies have reported structural and functional changes in heroin-dependent individuals, which enhanced our perception of the neruomechanisms of heroin addiction. Voxel based morphometry method was mainly employed in previous studies to investigate the brain structure abnormalities among heroin-dependent individuals. However, few studies focused on the abnormalities of cortical thickness in heroin-dependent individuals.Firstly, the methods of voxel based morphometry and cortical thickness measurement were introduced. Secondly, eleven heroin-dependent individuals and13age-, sex-, education-matched healthy subjects were included in this study. In order to explain the cortical findings, voxel based morphometry method was employed to investigate the gray matter volume changes in heroin-dependent individuals. Finally, the Freesurfer was used to assess the cortical thickness abnormalities in heroin-dependent individuals. Statistical analysis of the two indicators showed that significant regions of gray matter alteration were found at caudal middle frontal cortex,cuneus,inferior temporal cortex, isthmus of the cingulate cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, middle temporal cortex, rostral middle frontal cortex,superior frontal cortex, temporal pole. The result strongly supports the fact that cortical gray matter volume gives a mixed measurement of brain morphometry, while cortical thickness is only a single thickness attribute.Joint analysis using both of the two methods demonstrates that the brain regions implicated with heroin addiction were located in prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe and insula. The experiment result gives a strong proof of the necessity and broad development prospects using two indicators jointly in the future study.This paper is cross-disciplinary study between the applied mathematics and the life science. |
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