Neural circuitry related to reward sensitivity is reliably involved in alcohol craving, yet how craving influences functional connectivity between brain regions remains unclear. The ventral striatum receives synaptic inputs from the OFC, dlPFC, and limbic structures, such as the amygdala and hippocampus (Groenewegen et al., 1999), and preclinical data suggests functional activity in the striatum is directly influenced by input from the cortex (Brown et al., 1998). Thus the fronto-striatal pathway is likely affected in alcohol dependence as abnormal fronto-striatal functional connectivity has been associated with impairments in learning from prediction errors as well as with the magnitude of alcohol craving (Park et al., 2010). These findings are taken as evidence that fronto-striatal coupling is related to alcohol dependent patients’ ability to control their craving for alcohol, even though the expression of reward prediction errors in the ventral striatum was intact in these patients (Park et al., 2010). A recent study of tobacco and food craving found that decreases in craving correlated with decreases in ventral striatum activation and increases in dlPFC activation, with ventral striatal activation fully mediating the
