MDMA intoxication and verbal memory performance: a placebo-controlled pharmaco-MRI study
Journal of Psychopharmacology May 26, 2011 Kim P. C. Kuypers, Marleen Wingen, Armin Heinecke et al. 19 citations
A single 75 mg dose of MDMA impairs memory encoding by disrupting activity in the left middle frontal gyrus (BA10). In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, 14 Ecstasy users completed a word-learning task during pharmaco-MRI. Under MDMA, performance on the experimental word list (which required encoding) was worse than under placebo. Encoding-related brain activity was found in frontal, temporal, and parietal regions, but MDMA specifically interfered with activation in the left middle frontal gyrus, right fusiform gyrus, and left cuneus. Only the middle frontal gyrus showed a correlation between brain activity and behavioral performance: during placebo, better performance corresponded with greater activation, but this relationship disappeared under MDMA.