Decision-making deficits are still present in heroin abusers after short- to long-term abstinence

Substance dependent individuals (SDIs) consistently show deficits in decision making with biased choices toward immediate rewards, even at the expense of future consequences. However, relatively little evidence has been reported concerning the population of drug abusers who are exclusively addicted to heroin.

The present study tested 124 male abstinent "pure" heroin (AH) abusers (divided into short-term, mid-term, and long-term groups based on their length of abstinence) and 43 healthy controls (HC) intending to address this issue. Two decision-making tasks, the Delay Discounting Task (DDT) and the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) were employed to measure their decision-making performance.

Compared to HC participants, AH participants made significantly poorer choices on both the DDT and the IGT and the poor decision-making performances were not influenced by their lengths of abstinence. It is suggested that heroin-abuse-related decision-making deficits that are demonstrated by rapidly discounting future rewards; preferring incentives with large short-term gains while ignoring accompanying potential risks; and being inflexible in adjusting decision-making behaviors in accordance with outcome feedback, may not be compensated for even after a long period of abstinence from heroin abuse.

Hence, this inability to recover should be taken into consideration in the evaluation, prevention and intervention of heroin abuse and relapse.