Chunk #36 — 4. Discussion — 4.1. Aberrant FC in Individuals with AUD — 4.1.2. Hypoconnectivity across Anterior–Posterior and Interhemispheric Connections in AUD
In tandem with the local hyper-connectivity in prefrontal and parietal regions (as discussed in the previous section), the AUD group also manifested hypoconnectivity in the majority of the top significant connections (9 of 14), which included anterior–posterior and interhemispheric long-range connections (Figure 5) across fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal regions. While the fronto-parietal network includes hub regions for cognitive control [104] and is implicated in several neuropsychiatric disorders [105], the fronto-temporal network subserves linguistic processing [106] and social cognition [107] and is primarily implicated in psychoses and autism [108,109,110]. As mentioned above, there are only a handful of fMRI FC studies on AUD and they differ extensively in methodology and the networks that were examined. On the other hand, a few studies on other addictions point to converging findings. For example, a recent study on internet gaming addiction suggested that the addicted individuals showed hypoconnectivity in the long-range anterior–posterior connections, viz., between the medial PFC and the PCC and between the left IPL and the medial PFC [111]. In a study on smoking addiction, Tang et al. [112] reported that smokers had
