Neural Correlates of Craving in Methamphetamine Abuse

Methamphetamine is a powerful psychostimulant that causes significant neurological impairments with long-lasting effects and has provoked serious international concerns about public health. Denial of drug abuse and drug craving are two important factors that make the diagnosis and treatment extremely challenging. Here, we present a novel and rapid noninvasive method with potential application for differentiation and monitoring methamphetamine abuse.

Visual stimuli comprised a series of images with neutral and methamphetamine-related content. A total of 10 methamphetamine abusers and 10 age-gender matched controls participated in the experiments. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded and compared using a time window analysis method. The ERPs were divided into 19 time windows of 100 ms with 50 ms overlaps. The area of positive sections below each window was calculated to measure the differences between the two groups.

Significant differences between two groups were observed from 250 to 500 ms (P300) in response to methamphetamine-related visual stimuli and 600 to 800 ms in response to neutral stimuli.

This study presented a novel and noninvasive method based on neural correlates to discriminate healthy individuals from methamphetamine drug abusers. This method can be employed in treatment and monitoring of the methamphetamine abuse.