A Study Of Abnormal Salience Network In Adolescents With Internet Gaming Disorder

As one of the common mental health problems amongst adolescents, Internet gaming disorder(IGD) has been increasingly recognized both in public and the scientific community worldwide. Previous studies only focus on the regional brain abnormalities and impaired cognitive control in IGD. However, as far as we know, brain regions do not work in isolation, they work in concert, forming neural networks to produce subjective perception, motivation and behavior. Therefore, the interconnectivities of isolated brain regions may be more important to understand the abnormal cognitive control abilities of IGD adolescents.In the present study, Seventeen students with IGD and 17 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls without IGD were enrolled. Firstly, we combined resting-state functional connectivity(RSFC) and diffusion tensor imaging(DTI) tractography approach to investigate whether the functional connectivity and structural connectivity within salience network(SN) were disturbed in IGD adolescents. In addition, the coupling of functional connectivity and structural connectivity within SN were explored. We chosen the SN as the research object for two reasons:(1) The anterior cingulate cortex(ACC) and insula have shown functional and structural alterations in IGD.(2) One theory is that the SN, which includes the ACC and insula, regulates dynamic changes in other brain core networks to modulate cognitive control. Compared to healthy controls, our results demonstrated that the right SN tract showed the decreased fractional anisotropy(FA) in IGD adolescents, though no significant differences of functional connectivity were detected. In addition, the structural connectivity was not correlated with functional connectivity within SN in neither IGD adolescents nor healthy controls. Then, we detected the cognitive control ability in the IGD adolescents using the color-word Stroop task. The errors during the incongruent condition were negatively correlated with the FA values of the right SN tract in IGD adolescents.In conclusion, the connection between the structural connectivity findings and the behavioral assessments could improve our understanding of the SN as a critical role in IGD. It is hoped that the brain-behavior relationship from network perspective may enhance the understanding of IGD.