ArticleQuantitative imaging in medicine and surgery2021
Differences in cue-induced brain activation between long-term methadone maintenance treatment and protracted abstinence in heroin use disorder patients: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.
Article in Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 8 citations in OpenAlex.
- Common and disorder-specific aberrant activation during reward and loss processing in major depressive disorder and addiction: a meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Pooled it
- Investigating hierarchical control among functional networks disrupted by opioid use disorder using effective connectivity.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The difference in the effect of methadone and protracted abstinence on the coupling among key large-scale brain networks of individuals with heroin use disorder: A resting-state fMRI study.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
backgroundHeroin use disorder (HUD) remains one of the gravest public health issues in China. Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) and protracted abstinence (PA) are the most commonly used treatments for HUD. Although both treatment approaches can alleviate heroin cravings, a previous study found that MMT patients had stronger cue-induced brain activation than patients undergoing PA; however, the changes associated with long-term treatment are unclear.
methodsMale patients with HUD who had been undergoing either PA (n=24) or MTT (n=21) for approximately 12 months, together with 20 demographically matched healthy controls, completed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task. The subjective craving for heroin was evaluated using a visual analog scale.
resultsCompared to the healthy controls, the MMT and PA groups demonstrated significantly higher brain activation in the left pallidum, middle occipital gyrus, postcentral gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, middle cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule, superior parietal lobule, amygdala, hippocampus, right inferior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus triangularis, and caudate during exposure to heroin-related cues. Compared to those undergoing PA, patients in the MMT group demonstrated significantly higher brain activation in all of these regions. Except for the left inferior parietal lobule and left superior parietal lobule, there were no statistically significant differences between the PA and healthy control groups. The MMT patients showed significantly higher subjective cravings before and after exposure to heroin cues than the PA group, but there was no significant difference in the change in subjective cravings between the 2 groups.
conclusionsThe results suggested that although the HUD patients receiving long-term MMT complied with the treatment, they still had higher subjective cravings and cue-induced brain activation than those undergoing PA. Therefore, long-term PA appears to be more beneficial than MMT in reducing the salience value of drug cues in patients with HUD.
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