Structural MRI shows promise predicting relapse among patients battling opioid addiction
Structural MRI has shown promise predicting whether patients recovering from opioid addiction may be at risk of relapse, according to research from Rutgers University.
The new diagnostic method combines imaging and machine learning to seek patterns in functional connectivity and brain structure data. Based on testing with a small sample of patients, MRI scans of recoverees appeared similar to those of control subjects without previous pain pill addictions. Rutgers believe imaging could prove useful in managing this patient population.
“People can say one thing, but brain patterns do not lie,” said Suchismita Ray, PhD, lead researcher and an associate professor in the Department of Health Informatics at Rutgers School of Health Professions. “The brain patterns that the algorithm identified from brain volume and functional connectivity biomarkers from prescription opioid users hold great promise to improve over current diagnosis.”
Opioid addiction has reached epidemic levels in the U.S., bringing with it greater need to understand disease characteristics. Scientists have discovered brain biomarkers tied to neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, but not yet prescription opioid use. Ray and colleagues used structural MRI as part of their approach to distinguish between 26 patients with the pill disorder and 21 healthy controls without.
Their findings showed MRI’s sensitivity to help determine the long-term neural effects of prescription opioid addiction, the authors concluded.
“Our approach was able to segregate prescription opioid users from healthy participants based on both brain volume and functional connectivity data,” Ray et al. wrote in the study, adding, “We would not have been able to detect functional connectivity differences between the groups without the machine learning analysis.”
Researchers emphasized that their findings are based on a small sample size, underlining the need for further investigation.
“Future neuroimaging studies in [prescription opioid use disorder] will … be critical in extending our preliminary findings from the lab to the clinic,” the study’s authors concluded.
You can read more about Rutger’s work in NeuroImage:Clinical here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.