Key result
Acute buprenorphine decreases Pe amplitudes and frontal delta oscillations versus placebo, reducing motivational error signals.
Why the study?
It remains poorly understood how opioid administration interacts with cognitive functions, including whether acute opioid administration affects error processing.
Does acute administration of 0.2 mg buprenorphine affect error processing and motivational error signals in male volunteers?
RCT (n=42)
Double-blind
Does acute administration of 0.2 mg buprenorphine affect error processing and motivational error signals in male volunteers?
Acute administration of buprenorphine dampens neural motivational error signals and conscious error appraisal without altering overt behavioral performance.
This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.
While opioid addiction has reached pandemic proportions, we still lack a good understanding of how the administration of opioids interacts with cognitive functions. Error processing - the ability to detect erroneous actions and correct one's behaviour afterwards - is one such cognitive function that might be susceptible to opioidergic influences. Errors are hypothesised to induce aversive negative arousal, while opioids have been suggested to reduce aversive arousal induced by unpleasant and stressful stimuli. Thus, this study investigated whether the acute administration of an opioid would affect error processing. In a double-blind between-subject study, 42 male volunteers were recruited and received either 0.2 mg buprenorphine (a partial µ-opioid receptor agonist and κ-opioid receptor antagonist) or a placebo pill before they performed a stimulus-response task provoking errors. Electroencephalograms (EEG) were recorded while participants performed the task. We observed no group differences in terms of reaction times, error rates, and affective state ratings during the task between buprenorphine and control participants. Additional measures of adaptive control, however, showed interfering effects of buprenorphine administration. On the neural level, decreased Pe (Error Positivity) amplitudes were found in buprenorphine compared to control participants following error commission. Further, frontal delta oscillations were decreased in the buprenorphine group after all responses. Our neural results jointly demonstrate a general reduction in error processing in those participants who received an opioid before task completion, thereby suggesting that opioids might have indeed the potential to dampen motivational error signals. Importantly, the effects of the opioid were evident in more elaborate error processing stages, thereby impacting on processes of conscious error appraisal and evidence accumulation.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Acute buprenorphine attenuates neural error signals in volunteers; extends opioid modulation of motivation to error processing without behavioral change.
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Pfabigan et al. (2021) conducted an RCT in Healthy volunteers (n=42). buprenorphine vs. placebo was evaluated on Error processing (reaction times, error rates, affective state ratings, Pe amplitudes, and frontal delta oscillations). Acute administration of buprenorphine decreased Pe amplitudes and frontal delta oscillations compared to placebo, demonstrating a reduction in motivational error signals.
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