In addition to these primary effects of nicotine and smoking, other functional imaging studies reviewed here focus on smoking-related states, such as cue-induced cigarette craving. Such studies are part of a large body of literature examining cue-induced craving for addictive drugs. Studies specific for cigarette cues/craving reveal that exposure to visual cigarette cues immediately activates mesolimbic (VTA, amygdala, and hippocampus) and visuospatial cortical attention areas of the brain, and acutely (over a 30-min period) activate paralimbic regions (ACC and OFC), and that this cue-induced activation may be diminished by a course of bupropion treatment. These results are similar to those of functional imaging studies for drugs other than tobacco (Goldstein and Volkow 2002; Miller and Goldsmith 2001), and it has been posited that at least some of the activations seen with cigarette-related cues (cortical attention areas and OFC) are associated with an expectation of smoking in the nontreatment-seeking subjects who participated in these studies (Wilson et al. 2004).
