Work establishes new paradigm for studying drug addiction with naturalistic stimuli that resemble the real, lived experiences of patients
Mount Sinai researchers have found that a brain region that is implicated extensively in value-based decision-making and craving in people with heroin use disorder – known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) – shows synchronized responses biased towards drug content, outcompeting other typical subjects of attention and motivation, in a group of individuals with heroin use disorder who watched “Trainspotting,” the Academy Award-nominated 1996 movie about people who use heroin in Scotland.
Importantly, the research team also found that the OFC’s bias toward drug stimuli was significantly reduced in people who underwent treatment/abstinence from drugs. The study results appear in the May issue of Brain.