Patterns of reduced cortical thickness and striatum pathological morphology in cocaine addiction.

Substance addiction is regarded as an important public health problem, perpetuated by fronto-striatal circuit pathology. A usual finding in neuroimaging human and murine studies is cortical thinning and lower volume when compared to healthy controls. In this study we wished to replicate cortical thinning findings and find if striatum morphology may explain the cortical pathology. For this we analyzed T1w neuroimaging data from an ongoing addiction Mexican dataset. This dataset includes cocaine addicts diagnosed by expert psychiatrists and healthy controls. For the analysis we used voxel-based morphometry, cortical thickness and volumetric analysis of the basal ganglia, and we correlated striatum volume with cortical thickness to find pathological patterns. Our group contrast showed cortical thinning and striatum volume differences in cocaine addicts correlated to their years of substance use, craving and age. Our correlation between striatum-cortex morphology showed higher significant correlations in healthy controls, not observed in cocaine addicts. The correlation between striatum volume and cortical thickness in healthy controls involved similar areas as those shown with less cortical thickness in cocaine addicts. We suggest that striatum morphological changes in addiction may explain the pattern of cortical thinning observed across several substances addiction studies.