Task-related differences in network connectivity and dynamics in people with severe opioid use disorder compared with healthy controls.

One approach to addressing the immense unmet need for treatments of severe opioid use disorder (sOUD) is to understand more about associated changes in the brain's reward circuitry. It has been shown that during reward anticipation in the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task, people with severe substance use disorder (SUD) show blunted responses in reward neural circuitry compared with healthy controls (HC). Conversely, drug-related cues result in heightened responses in the same neural reward circuitry in those with SUD compared with HC. However, it is unclear how such dysfunctional reward processing is related to neural correlates of other processes commonly dysregulated in addiction, such as attention and cognition. The aim of this work was to evaluate whether people with sOUD show different relationships between reward networks to networks that regulate cognition, attention, sensory processes, and more. Then, we evaluated whether there is a spatial relationship between differences in brain function and atlases of μ-opioid receptor (MOR) and dopamine D