Although our study is the first to identify abnormalities in brain-EC specific to individuals with AUD using spectral DCM based on the MVPA, there are several notable limitations. Firstly, due to the demographic distribution of AUD in treatment, data were collected exclusively from male subjects, and future research should give full consideration to including female subjects. Secondly, the co-occurrence of smoking and AUDs is common, and although we performed a partial correlation analysis to control for the effects of smoking, future studies could employ more rigorous controls to mitigate potential confounding effects of smoking. Thirdly, future studies should consider incorporating multimodal neuroimaging data to improve the classification of AUD from HCs. Additionally, it is important to investigate the efficacy connectivity among all brain regions as excluded regions may contain valuable information. This could lead to a better understanding of large-scale efficacy network connectivity abnormalities in individuals with AUD.
