The prefrontal cortex is centrally involved in the neurobiological circuitry that promotes drug use and compulsive drug-seeking behavior, and appears to be similarly involved for various drugs of abuse [3], [4]. We therefore hypothesized that multiple types of drug abuse would share common transcriptional changes, due to similar changes in cellular function. We tested this using microarray analysis of postmortem aPFC from 42 cases with varied drug abuse histories as determined by postmortem case history reviews, next-of-kin interviews, and toxicological examination.
