Högskolan i Skövde

This systematic review provides an overview of cocaine addiction, focusing on its long-termeffects on cognitive functions and the underlying neural circuits. It includes studies that haveutilized fMRI to examine brain activity patterns during tasks related to reward processing,moral reasoning, emotional regulation, and response inhibition. This study comparescocaine users and healthy controls using existing research from Web of Science and MedlineEBSCO, resulting in a total of five studies. The findings indicate that cocaine addiction altersbrain activation patterns, leading to deficits in the corresponding cognitive processes. Specifically, reduced activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsolateralprefrontal cortex (DLPFC) points to disrupted reward processing mechanisms. Decreasedneural activity in brain areas involved in moral judgment, including vmPFC, and DLPFC,indicates impairments in moral reasoning. A positive correlation between superior temporalgyrus (STG) activity and years of cocaine use suggests a decline in inhibitory controlcapacity, while increased amygdala activity indicates problems with emotion regulation. Insummary, cocaine users exhibit abnormal neural activity patterns, reflecting cognitiveimpairments due to prolonged drug use.