ArticleEuropean archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience2026
Impairment of the GABAergic system in the prefrontal cortex of male heroin addicts.
Article in European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Opioid addiction is a global concern and the largest health burden among drug use disorders. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions play a key multifaceted role in behavioural regulation, and GABAergic interneurons regulate the output of the PFC, whose dysfunction has been linked to the behavioural abnormalities observed in opioid-addicted individuals. In these neurons, glutamate decarboxylase (GAD), with its isoforms GAD 65 and 67, is a key enzyme in the synthesis of GABA. Our study, which was performed on paraffin-embedded brains from the Magdeburg Brain Bank, aimed to investigate abnormalities in the GABAergic function of the PFC regions, i.e. the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), in opioid addiction by densitometric evaluation of GAD 65/67-immunostained neuropil bilaterally. The neuropil was assessed in parallel with the density of immunostained somata. The study showed a significantly decreased neuropil density in layer III of the left ventral part of the ACC (ACCv) in 13 heroin-addicted males, compared to 12 healthy controls (U-test P value 0.04). There were no significant differences in somata density in any of the investigated PFC regions. Analysis of the confounding variables that differed significantly between the compared groups (i.e. age, brain volume, and duration of formalin fixation) showed that these variables did not affect the results. Our findings are the first in human postmortem research to suggest a dysregulation of the GABAergic system in the PFC region in opioid-addicted individuals, which supports human neuroimaging research and contributes to the understanding of opioid addiction.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.