At present, methadone maintenance treatment (MMT), a low-toxic replacement therapy, is the main drug treatment for heroin addicts in China. However, illegal drug use or integrity rate of patients significantly vary among different clinics.
Clinical neuropsychological study shows that a variety of factors, such as age, gender, genetics, environmental and other factors, individually or collectively lead to individual differences in MMT results for patients, and these factors can be utilized as predictors for MMT results to certain extent. However, due to the diversity and subjectivity of research results, no predictors or strategies have been applied in clinical treatment. Therefore, it is one of the most intriguing research directions to distinguish relapse risk of MMT patients in a timely and accurate manner, thereby implementing targeted therapeutic plan.
The team led by Associate Professor Wang Yarong from Department of Radiology of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi 'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) cooperated with Professor Wang Wei’s team from Air Force Medical University of PLA to innovatively utilize the hubs of neural circuits associated with addition and their degree centrality in resting-state brain network and adopt the unsupervised learning method of cluster analysis based on the construction of addiction-associated brain network to prospectively identify the populations at high relapse risk using novel imaging methods. MMT patients can be identified and classified into high and low relapse risk subgroups even if we are blind to their relapse outcomes in advance. The findings in this study also reveal that high relapse risk patients have a wider range of neuropathological changes, and NAc, vACC, hippocampus and amygdala play a role in promoting illegal drug use. These brain regions may be potential psychological and drug therapeutic targets in the future.
Recently, these research results were published as an Original Article entitled “Relapse risk revealed by degree centrality and cluster analysis in heroin addicts undergoing methadone maintenance treatment” in a prestigious academic journal Psychological Medicine. Wang Lei, a doctoral student from Department of Radiology of our hospital, is the first author. Associate Professor Wang Yarong is the corresponding author of this article.
