EEG coherence related to fMRI resting state synchrony in long-term abstinent alcoholics

Recent work suggests that faulty co-activation or synchrony of multiple brain regions comprising “networks,” or an imbalance between opposing brain networks, is important in alcoholism. Previous studies showed higher fMRI resting state synchrony (RSS) within the executive control (inhibitory control and emotion regulation) networks and lower RSS within the appetitive drive network in long-term (multi-year) abstinent alcoholics (LTAA) vs. non substance abusing controls (NSAC). Our goal was to identify EEG networks that are correlated with the appetitive drive and executive function networks identified with fMRI in our previous alcohol studies. We used parallel ICA for multimodal data fusion for the 20 LTAA and 21 NSAC that had both usable fMRI and 64-channel EEG data. Our major result was that parallel ICA identified a pair of components that significantly separated NSAC from LTAA and were correlated with each other. Examination of the resting-state fMRI seed-correlation map component showed higher bilateral nucleus accumbens seed-correlation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally and lower seed-correlation in the thalamus. This single component thus encompassed both the executive control and appetitive drive networks, consistent with our previous work. The correlated EEG coherence component showed mostly higher theta and alpha coherence in LTAA compared to NSAC, and lower gamma coherence in LTAA compared to NSAC. The EEG theta and alpha coherence results suggest enhanced top-down control in LTAA and the gamma coherence results suggest impaired appetitive drive in LTAA. Our results support the notion that fMRI RSS is reflected in spontaneous EEG, even when the EEG and fMRI are not obtained simultaneously.