Several limitations of this study should be noted. The connectivity analysis here reveals interregional correlations but not information regarding causal or directional relationships between nodes, or whether other brain regions may drive these relationships. To identify ICNs, we used a publicly available atlas of functional ROIs (Shirer et al., 2012). This approach defined networks of interest based on an independent sample to allow for unbiased evaluation of differences between our cases and controls. Network definition is an ongoing question in the field, and the use of another atlas, or of data driven ROIs, may be evaluated as a focus of future work. In addition, this study is cross-sectional and observational, thus we are unable to assess causation, and it is possible that other models would be an equally good fit to the data (c.f., (MacCallum et al., 1993)). Further, given the high correlation between the length of chronic alcohol use and age, we are unable to determine the independent effects of these variables in this study. And despite the correlation we report between LECN and disorder severity, the effect size
