Nicotine dependence and insula subregions: functional connectivity and cue-induced activation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nicotine dependence is a major predictor of relapse in people with Tobacco Use Disorder (TUD). Accordingly, therapies that reduce nicotine dependence may promote sustained abstinence from smoking. The insular cortex has been identified as a promising target in brain-based therapies for TUD, and has three major sub-regions (ventral anterior, dorsal anterior, and posterior) that serve distinct functional networks. How these subregions and associated networks contribute to nicotine dependence is not well understood, and therefore was the focus of this study. Sixty individuals (28 women; 18-45 years old), who smoked cigarettes daily, rated their level of nicotine dependence (on the Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence) and, after abstaining from smoking overnight (~12 h), underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a resting state. A subset of these participants (N = 48) also completing a cue-induced craving task during fMRI. Correlations between nicotine dependence and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) and cue-induced activation of the major insular sub-regions were evaluated. Nicotine dependence was negatively correlated with connectivity of the left and right dorsal, and left ventral anterior insula with regions within the superior parietal lobule (SPL), including the left precuneus. No relationship between posterior insula connectivity and nicotine dependence was found. Cue-induced activation in the left dorsal anterior insula was positively associated with nicotine dependence and negatively associated with RSFC of the same region with SPL, suggesting that craving-related responsivity in this subregion was greater among participants who were more dependent. These results may inform therapeutic approaches, such as brain stimulation, which may elicit differential clinical outcomes (e.g., dependence, craving) depending on the insular subnetwork that is targeted.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".