Reward-related brain response and craving correlates of marijuana cue exposure: a preliminary study in treatment-seeking marijuana-dependent subjects.

Objective: : Determining the brain substrates underlying the motivation to abuse addictive drugs is critical for understanding and treating addictive disorders. Laboratory neuroimaging studies have demonstrated differential activation of limbic and motivational circuitry (eg, amygdala, hippocampus, ventral striatum, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex) triggered by cocaine, heroin, nicotine, and alcohol cues. The literature on neural responses to marijuana cues is sparse.

Neural correlates of attentional bias for smoking cues: modulation by variance in the dopamine transporter gene.

Cigarette-dependent smokers automatically and involuntarily orient attention toward smoking cues (SCs). This attentional bias is clinically significant, as it may contribute to relapse. Thus, identifying neural and genetic correlates of attentional bias is critical for improving interventions.

Low prefrontal perfusion linked to depression symptoms in methadone-maintained opiate-dependent patients.

Background: Clinically depressed patients without substance use disorders, compared to controls, exhibit significantly lower resting regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In this study, we examined the link between resting rCBF in the PFC and current depressive symptoms in methadone-maintained opiate-dependent (MM) patients with or without major depression.

Methods: Arterial spin labeled perfusion fMRI at 3 Tesla was used to measure resting rCBF in 21 MM patients.

Menstrual cycle phase at quit date predicts smoking status in an NRT treatment trial: a retrospective analysis.

Background And Objective: The deleterious health consequences of smoking are even more severe for women, yet ironically, they have more difficulty quitting than men. Identifying relapse predictors for women and implementing strategies to increase their chances of successfully quitting and remaining abstinent are important goals. Clinicians and researchers suggest that women could achieve greater success in smoking cessation interventions if the initial quit attempt coincided with the follicular phase (i.

Prelude to passion: limbic activation by "unseen" drug and sexual cues.

Background: The human brain responds to recognizable signals for sex and for rewarding drugs of abuse by activation of limbic reward circuitry. Does the brain respond in similar way to such reward signals even when they are "unseen", i.e.

The role of attentional bias in substance abuse.

There has been much recent interest in the idea that drug users show biased attention toward drug-related events. Because drug stimuli produce conditioned responses that may motivate drug taking, biased attention toward these cues may play an important role in drug use and relapse following treatment. The performance of drug users on the Stroop task and visual dot-probe task has been interpreted as demonstrating attentional bias toward drug cues specific to an individual's drug use history.

Retrospective study: influence of menstrual cycle on cue-induced cigarette craving.

Cigarettes acquire reinforcing properties from nicotine and from cues associated with their intake. However, smoking in males and females may be reinforced differentially. Smoking in females is posited to be influenced more by cues whereas male smoking is influenced predominantly by the direct pharmacological actions of nicotine in the brain.

Comparing attentional bias to smoking cues in current smokers, former smokers, and non-smokers using a dot-probe task.

Much evidence documents that individuals with emotional and drug-use disorders demonstrate biased attention toward stimuli associated with their disorder. This bias appears to diminish following successful treatment. Two studies examined whether current cigarette smokers show biased attention toward smoking-related images compared with non-smokers (Studies 1 and 2) and whether this bias is less pronounced in former smokers (Study 2).

A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled safety study of high-dose dextromethorphan in methadone-maintained male inpatients.

The NMDA antagonist dextromethorphan hydrobromide (DM) may be useful in the treatment of opioid dependence, particularly as a means of reducing tolerance to methadone during replacement therapy. As a prelude to clinical efficacy studies, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study examined the safety of DM in combination with methadone in inpatient, opiate-dependent volunteers. Male participants received daily methadone (50-70 mg/day) and either DM (n=10) or placebo (n=5) during the 12-day active medication phase of the study.

Detecting smoking following smoking cessation treatment.

Our study compared the results of self-report (SR) plus breath carbon monoxide (CO) monitoring to SR plus urine cotinine (COT) analysis of recent tobacco use for a recently completed smoking cessation study that compared the efficacy of different intensities of psychosocial treatments coupled with 8 weeks of patch treatment. Treatment outcomes were assessed 9, 26, and 52 weeks from treatment initiation in 200+ patients using both measurement types. COT was able to detect self-reported smoking in over 97% of the cases at all time points, while CO detected self-reported smoking 62, 84, and 89% of the time for the three follow-up assessments.