Brain response in heavy drinkers during cross-commodity alcohol and money discounting with potentially real rewards: A preliminary study.

Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with exaggerated preference for immediate rewards, a candidate endophenotype for use disorders. Addiction symptomology is often well-described by the preference for immediate intoxication over other delayed prosocial rewards. We measured brain activation in AUD-implicated regions during a cross-commodity delay discounting (CCD) task with choices for immediate alcohol and delayed money.

Virtual reality intervention effects on future self-continuity and delayed reward preference in substance use disorder recovery: pilot study results.

Unlabelled: Sustained remission from substance use disorder (SUD) is challenged by high relapse rates, which provides opportunities for novel clinical interventions. Immersive virtual reality (VR) permits delivering synthetic experiences that feel real and actualizes otherwise impossible scenarios for therapeutic benefit. We report on the feasibility of an immersive VR intervention designed to increase valuation of the future by enhancing future self-continuity and leveraging future self-discrepancy with personalized future selves as SUD recovery support.

Intoxication Effects on Impulsive Alcohol Choice in Heavy Drinkers: Correlation With Sensation Seeking and Differential Effects by Commodity.

Background: The preference for immediate rewards and high sensation seeking are both potent risk factors for alcohol use disorder (AUD), but how they interact during intoxication is poorly understood. To model decision making linked to AUD risk, we tested heavy drinkers for impulsive choice (delay discounting with alcohol:money or money:money) and behavioral sensation seeking using a novel odor choice task. Laboratory tasks measured actual behavior with real contingencies.

The disengaging brain: Dynamic transitions from cognitive engagement and alcoholism risk.

Human functional brain connectivity is usually measured either at "rest" or during cognitive tasks, ignoring life's moments of mental transition. We propose a different approach to understanding brain network transitions. We applied a novel independent component analysis of functional connectivity during motor inhibition (stop signal task) and during the continuous transition to an immediately ensuing rest.

Alcohol Use Disorder Interventions Targeting Brain Sites for Both Conditioned Reward and Delayed Gratification.

Alcohol use disorder is a destructive compulsion characterized by chronic relapse and poor recovery outcomes. Heightened reactivity to alcohol-associated stimuli and compromised executive function are hallmarks of alcohol use disorder. Interventions targeting these two interacting domains are thought to ameliorate these altered states, but the mutual brain sites of action are yet unknown.

Quantifying Behavioral Sensation Seeking With the Aroma Choice Task.

Our goal was to develop a behavioral measure of sensation seeking (SS). The Aroma Choice Task (ACT) assesses preference for an intense, novel, varied, and risky (exciting) option versus a mild, safe (boring) option using real-time odorant delivery. A total of 147 healthy young adults completed 40 binary choice trials.

Semiparametric Estimation of Task-Based Dynamic Functional Connectivity on the Population Level.

Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) estimates time-dependent associations between pairs of brain region time series as typically acquired during functional MRI. dFC changes are most commonly quantified by pairwise correlation coefficients between the time series within a sliding window. Here, we applied a recently developed bootstrap-based technique (Kudela et al.

Pairing neutral cues with alcohol intoxication: new findings in executive and attention networks.

Rationale: Alcohol-associated stimuli capture attention, yet drinkers differ in the precise stimuli that become paired with intoxication.

Objectives: Extending our prior work to examine the influence of alcoholism risk factors, we paired abstract visual stimuli with intravenous alcohol delivered covertly and examined brain responses to these Pavlovian-conditioned stimuli in fMRI when subjects were not intoxicated.

Methods: Sixty healthy drinkers performed task-irrelevant alcohol conditioning that presented geometric shapes as conditioned stimuli.

Family history of alcoholism and the human brain response to oral sucrose.

A heightened hedonic response to sweet tastes has been associated with increased alcohol preference and alcohol consumption in both humans and animals. The principal goal of this study was to examine blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activation to high- and low-concentration sweet solutions in subjects who are either positive (FHP) or negative (FHN) for a family history of alcoholism. Seventy-four non-treatment seeking, community-recruited, healthy volunteers (22.

Corticostriatal and Dopaminergic Response to Beer Flavor with Both fMRI and [(11) C]raclopride Positron Emission Tomography.

Background: Cue-evoked drug-seeking behavior likely depends on interactions between frontal activity and ventral striatal (VST) dopamine (DA) transmission. Using [(11) C]raclopride (RAC) positron emission tomography (PET), we previously demonstrated that beer flavor (absent intoxication) elicited VST DA release in beer drinkers, inferred by RAC displacement. Here, a subset of subjects from this previous RAC-PET study underwent a similar paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test how orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and VST blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses to beer flavor are related to VST DA release and motivation to drink.

Externalizing personality traits, empathy, and gray matter volume in healthy young drinkers.

Externalizing psychopathology has been linked to prefrontal abnormalities. While clinically diagnosed subjects show altered frontal gray matter, it is unknown if similar deficits relate to externalizing traits in non-clinical populations. We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to retrospectively analyze the cerebral gray matter volume of 176 young adult social to heavy drinkers (mean age=24.

Associations between regional brain physiology and trait impulsivity, motor inhibition, and impaired control over drinking.

Trait impulsivity and poor inhibitory control are well-established risk factors for alcohol misuse, yet little is known about the associated neurobiological endophenotypes. Here we examined correlations among brain physiology and self-reported trait impulsive behavior, impaired control over drinking, and a behavioral measure of response inhibition. A sample of healthy drinkers (n = 117) completed a pulsed arterial spin labeling (PASL) scan to quantify resting regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF), as well as measures of self-reported impulsivity (Eysenck I7 Impulsivity scale) and impaired control over drinking.

Monetary discounting and ventral striatal dopamine receptor availability in nontreatment-seeking alcoholics and social drinkers.

Rationale: Dopamine (DA) in the ventral striatum (VST) has long been implicated in addiction pathologies, yet its role in temporal decision-making is not well-understood.

Objectives: To determine if VST DA D2 receptor availability corresponds with greater impulsive choice in both nontreatment-seeking alcoholics (NTS) and social drinkers (SD).

Methods: NTS subjects (n = 10) and SD (n = 13) received PET scans at baseline with the D2/D3 radioligand [(11)C]raclopride (RAC).

Beer self-administration provokes lateralized nucleus accumbens dopamine release in male heavy drinkers.

Rationale: Although striatal dopamine (DA) is important in alcohol abuse, the nature of DA release during actual alcohol drinking is unclear, since drinking includes self-administration of both conditioned flavor stimuli (CS) of the alcoholic beverage and subsequent intoxication, the unconditioned stimulus (US).

Objectives: Here, we used a novel self-administration analog to distinguish nucleus accumbens (NAcc) DA responses specific to the CS and US.

Methods: Right-handed male heavy drinkers (n = 26) received three positron emission tomography (PET) scans with the D2/D3 radioligand [(11)C]raclopride (RAC) and performed a pseudo self-administration task that separately administered a flavor CS of either a habitually consumed beer or the appetitive control Gatorade®, concomitant with the US of ethanol intoxication (0.

A preliminary study of the human brain response to oral sucrose and its association with recent drinking.

Background: A preference for sweet tastes has been repeatedly shown to be associated with alcohol preference in both animals and humans. In this study, we tested the extent to which recent drinking is related to blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activation from an intensely sweet solution in orbitofrontal areas known to respond to primary rewards.

Methods: Sixteen right-handed, non-treatment-seeking, healthy volunteers (mean age: 26 years; 75% male) were recruited from the community.

Beer flavor provokes striatal dopamine release in male drinkers: mediation by family history of alcoholism.

Striatal dopamine (DA) is increased by virtually all drugs of abuse, including alcohol. However, drug-associated cues are also known to provoke striatal DA transmission- a phenomenon linked to the motivated behaviors associated with addiction. To our knowledge, no one has tested if alcohol's classically conditioned flavor cues, in the absence of a significant pharmacologic effect, are capable of eliciting striatal DA release in humans.

Family history of alcoholism interacts with alcohol to affect brain regions involved in behavioral inhibition.

Rationale: Impulsive behavior is associated with both alcohol use disorders and a family history of alcoholism (FHA). One operational definition of impulsive behavior is the stop-signal task (SST) which measures the time needed to stop a ballistic hand movement.

Objective: Employ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study right frontal responses to stop signals in heavy drinking subjects with and without FHA, and as a function of alcohol exposure.

How acute and chronic alcohol consumption affects brain networks: insights from multimodal neuroimaging.

Background: Multimodal imaging combining 2 or more techniques is becoming increasingly important because no single imaging approach has the capacity to elucidate all clinically relevant characteristics of a network.

Methods: This review highlights recent advances in multimodal neuroimaging (i.e.

Limbic responses to reward cues correlate with antisocial trait density in heavy drinkers.

Antisocial traits are common among alcoholics- particularly in certain subtypes. Although people with antisocial tendencies show atypical brain activation in some emotion and reward paradigms, how the brain reward systems of heavy drinkers (HD) are influenced by antisocial traits remains unclear. We used subjects' preferred alcohol drink odors (AO), appetitive (ApCO) and non-appetitive (NApO) control odors in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine if reward system responses varied as a function of antisocial trait density (ASD).

Pharmacologic dissociation between impulsivity and alcohol drinking in high alcohol preferring mice.

Background: Impulsivity is genetically correlated with, and precedes, addictive behaviors and alcoholism. If impulsivity or attention is causally related to addiction, certain pharmacological manipulations of impulsivity and/or attention may affect alcohol drinking, and vice versa. The current studies were designed to explore the relationship among impulsivity, drinking, and vigilance in selectively bred High Alcohol Preferring (HAP) mice, a line that has previously demonstrated both high impulsivity and high alcohol consumption.

Schedule of passive ethanol exposure affects subsequent intragastric ethanol self-infusion.

Background: Many studies have shown that chronic ethanol exposure can enhance later self-administration of ethanol, but only a few studies have identified critical parameters for such exposure. The present studies examined temporal and other parameters of chronic ethanol exposure on subsequent intragastric (IG) self-infusion of ethanol.

Methods: Sprague-Dawley rats implanted with IG catheters were passively infused with ethanol for 5 to 6 days and then allowed to self-infuse ethanol or water using a procedure in which infusions were contingent upon licking fruit-flavored solutions.

Normal attention orienting but abnormal stimulus alerting and conflict effect in combined subtype of ADHD.

Recent pharmacological studies in animals and neuroimaging studies in normal humans suggest that the spatial and nonspatial cues in tasks measuring reflexive attention may be modulated by different neurotransmitter systems. The efficiency with which attention is oriented to explicit spatial cues may be altered by manipulating levels of brain acetylcholine, whereas reactions to nonspatial cues may be influenced by altering brain noradrenaline levels but not acetylcholine levels. In humans, however, previous attention studies have implicated dopamine when either explicit or implicit cueing is used.