Effects of drug abuse on brain activity in frontal cortex area

Abstract

People with a long history of drug abuse normally show structural abnormalities of the brain activities. These abnormalities is mostly caused by the changes in brain function due to the continuous of the drug use. In this paper, an identification of brain region which more affected by a long-term drug use is proposed. An experiment for twenty seven subjects (i.e., divided by group of addiction, methadone, and control) with five related drug pictures (i.e., randomly flashed in front of all subject) were conducted. To investigate which area of the human brain more affected due to its function, the EEG-P300 potential and its latency are evaluated. The lower average amplitudes and longer latencies are obtained from the frontal cortex in the addiction and rehabilitation group.