The impacts of actual and perceived nicotine administration on insula functional connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex and nucleus accumbens.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

The purpose of this study was to examine the impacts of perceived and actual nicotine administration on neural responses.

Why It Was Studied

Changes in resting state functional connectivity between the insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex as well as between the insula and nucleus accumbens have been linked to nicotine withdrawal and/or administration.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and double-blind.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

Inhaler content instructions (told nicotine vs told nicotine-free) differed across sessions.

Resting state functional connectivity between sub-regions of the insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and nucleus accumbens was measured using magnetic resonance imaging before and after inhaler administration.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Cerebral Cortex, Craving, Gyrus Cinguli, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Nicotine, Nucleus Accumbens and Smokers.

Author keywords: anterior cingulate cortex, expectancy and insula.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2019 (Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England)), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) compound page, all human trials.