Alcohol abuse and dependence remain significant public health issues, and yet the brain circuits that are involved in the rewarding effects of alcohol are poorly understood. One promising way to study the effects of alcohol on neural activity is to examine its effects on functional connectivity between brain areas involved in reward and other functions. Here, we compared the effects of two doses of alcohol (0.4 and 0.8 g/kg) to placebo on resting-state functional connectivity in brain circuits related to reward in 19 healthy young men without histories of alcohol problems. The higher, but not the lower, dose of alcohol, significantly increased connectivity from reward-related regions to sensory and motor cortex, and between seeds associated with cognitive control. Contrary to expectation, alcohol did not significantly change connectivity for the ventral striatum at either dose. These findings reveal unrecognized effects of alcohol on connectivity from reward-related regions to visual and sensory cortical areas.

酒精滥用和依赖仍然是重要的公共健康问题，但人们对酒精有益作用所涉及的大脑回路知之甚少。研究酒精对神经活动影响的一种有前途的方法是检查酒精对参与奖励和其他功能的大脑区域之间的功能连接的影响。在这里，我们比较了两种剂量的酒精（0.4 和 0.8 g/kg）与安慰剂对 19 名没有酒精问题史的健康年轻男性与奖赏相关的大脑回路中静息状态功能连接的影响。酒精的剂量越高，但不是越低，从奖励相关区域到感觉和运动皮层以及与认知控制相关的种子之间的连接性就显着增加。与预期相反，在任何剂量下，酒精都没有显着改变腹侧纹状体的连通性。这些发现揭示了酒精对从奖励相关区域到视觉和感觉皮层区域的连通性的未被认识的影响。