Publications by authors named "Verdejo-Garcia A"

Article Synopsis
  • Binge eating (BE) is linked to psychological challenges and rising prevalence rates, with motivational factors like delay discounting (DD) potentially influencing BE.
  • A study with 391 adult participants explored how food choice motives (Health, Mood, Sensory Appeal) mediate the relationship between DD and BE, revealing that a steeper DD leads to greater BE symptoms primarily due to lower Health motive consideration.
  • The findings highlight the importance of addressing food choice motives and DD in treating eating disorders, suggesting that personalized interventions could be beneficial.
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Objective: Long-term recovery rates following eating disorders (EDs) treatment remain low. This might be partly due to a lack of agreement between key stakeholder groups, including people with lived experience, carers, clinicians, and researchers, regarding optimal therapeutic targets and strategies. We aimed to reach a consensus across these diverse groups on the most valued treatment targets and strategies for fostering ED recovery.

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: Retention in treatment is crucial for the success of interventions targeting alcohol use disorder (AUD), which affects over 100 million people globally. Most previous studies have used classical statistical techniques to predict treatment dropout, and their results remain inconclusive. This study aimed to use novel machine learning tools to identify models that predict dropout with greater precision, enabling the development of better retention strategies for those at higher risk.

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After a risky choice, decision makers must frequently wait out a delay period before the outcome of their choice becomes known. In contemporary sports-betting apps, decision makers can "cash out" of their bet during this delay period by accepting a discounted immediate payout. An important open question is how availability of a postchoice cash-out option alters choice.

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Episodic future thinking (EFT) strengthens self-regulation abilities by increasing the perceived value of long-term reinforcements and reducing impulsive choice in delay discounting tasks. As such, EFT interventions have the potential to improve dietary and eating-related decision-making in individuals with obesity or binge eating symptoms, conditions associated with elevated delay discounting. Here, we meta-analyzed evidence from 12 studies that assessed whether EFT interventions improve delay discounting and real-world food choice compared to control interventions.

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Chatbots can effect large-scale behaviour change because they are accessible through social media, flexible, scalable, and gather data automatically. Yet research on the feasibility and effectiveness of chatbot-administered behaviour change interventions is sparse. The effectiveness of established behaviour change interventions when implemented in chatbots is not guaranteed, given the unique human-machine interaction dynamics.

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Background: The diversity of patients' symptomatology among people seeking treatment on community-based mental health services poses significant challenges to traditional models of care. Recent approaches favor identifying transdiagnostic factors that allow a better understanding of patient heterogeneity and designing more effective and quality interventions. This study examines the heterogeneity of patients with internalizing symptoms based on profiles identified with cognitive and motivational control variables.

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Background: Few interventions for food addiction (FA) report on dietary intake variables. The present study comprised a three-arm randomised controlled trial in adults with symptoms of FA. The aim was to evaluate dietary intake, sleep and physical activity resulting from a dietitian-led telehealth intervention at 3 months.

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Methamphetamine (METH, "Crystal Meth") and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, "Ecstasy") share structural-chemical similarities but have distinct psychotropic profiles due to specific neurochemical actions. Previous research has suggested that their impact on social cognitive functions and social behaviour may differ significantly, however, direct comparisons of METH and MDMA users regarding social cognition and interaction are lacking. Performances in cognitive and emotional empathy (Multifaceted Empathy Test) and emotion sensitivity (Face Morphing Task), as well as aggressive social behaviour (Competitive Reaction Time Task) were assessed in samples of n = 40 chronic METH users, n = 39 chronic MDMA users and n = 86 stimulant-naïve controls (total N = 165).

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Objective: Reward-based eating drives are putative mechanisms of uncontrolled eating implicated in obesity and disordered eating (e.g., binge eating).

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Article Synopsis
  • Neuroscience has identified key mechanisms involved in substance use disorders (SUD), aiming to use this knowledge to improve prevention and treatment strategies.
  • Ongoing research using large-scale studies from early childhood is generating valuable neuroscience data, but there's a lack of frameworks to effectively implement this information into prevention efforts.
  • The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) offers a promising multi-system approach to link neurobiological insights with behavioral interventions, leading to the identification of 22 unique preventive strategies targeting specific neurocognitive risk factors for SUDs.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study reviews the last 25 years of functional magnetic resonance imaging drug cue reactivity (FDCR) research, highlighting the gap between findings and clinical applications as no FDCR-derived biomarkers have been approved yet.
  • The objective is to summarize FDCR research, evaluate its readiness for biomarker development, and propose a systematic process for qualifying these biomarkers in the context of addiction treatment.
  • Out of 415 published FDCR studies from 1998 to 2022, a significant number explored addictive substances like nicotine and alcohol, suggesting potential for developing various types of biomarkers related to addiction, though most studies mainly focused on therapeutic and diagnostic responses.
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We aimed to map the topics and trends of research on digital health for myocardial infarction over the past ten years. This can inform future research directions and newly emerging topics for myocardial infarction care, diagnosis and monitoring. The Web of Science database was searched for papers related to digital health for myocardial infarction.

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Background: Cognitive disinhibition underpins alcohol and drug use problems. Although higher-risk substance use is consistently associated with poorer disinhibition, current findings may be limited by narrow recruitment methods, which over-represent individuals engaged in traditional treatment services with more severe presentations. We embedded a novel gamified disinhibition task (the Cognitive Impulsivity Suite; CIS) in a national online addiction support service ( https://www.

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People with methamphetamine use disorder (MUD) struggle to shift their behaviour from methamphetamine-orientated habits to goal-oriented choices. The model-based/model-free framework is well suited to understand this difficulty by unpacking the computational mechanisms that support experienced-based (model-free) and goal-directed (model-based) choices. We aimed to examine whether 1) participants with MUD differed from controls on behavioural proxies and/or computational mechanisms of model-based/model-free choices; 2) model-based/model-free decision-making correlated with MUD symptoms; and 3) model-based/model-free deficits improved over six weeks in the group with MUD.

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers studied a program called TRACE to help people who eat in a way that feels out of control and to improve their mental health.
  • The study included 175 adults and compared three groups: one that received active help, one that received passive help, and a control group with no special help.
  • Results showed that those in the active help group had the biggest improvements in their eating habits and also felt less depressed and stressed compared to the control group.
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Background: Individuals with cocaine use disorder or gambling disorder demonstrate impairments in cognitive flexibility: the ability to adapt to changes in the environment. Flexibility is commonly assessed in a laboratory setting using probabilistic reversal learning, which involves reinforcement learning, the process by which feedback from the environment is used to adjust behavior.

Aims: It is poorly understood whether impairments in flexibility differ between individuals with cocaine use and gambling disorders, and how this is instantiated by the brain.

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Background: The aims of this study were to investigate the association of early life factors, including birth weight, birth length, and breastfeeding practices, with structural brain networks; and to test whether structural brain networks associated with early life factors were also associated with academic performance in children with overweight/obesity (OW/OB).

Method: 96 children with OW/OB aged 8-11 years (10.03 ± 1.

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Background: Myocardial infarction (MI) is a debilitating condition and a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Digital health is a promising approach for delivering secondary prevention to support patients with a history of MI and for reducing risk factors that can lead to a future event. However, its potential can only be fulfilled when the technology meets the needs of the end users who will be interacting with this secondary prevention.

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In Fenneman et al.'s (2022) review of theories and integrated impulsivity model, the authors distinguish between information impulsivity (i.e.

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Background: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults is strongly associated with psychiatric comorbidity and functional impairment. Here, we aimed to use a newly developed online cognitive battery with strong psychometric properties for measuring individual differences in three cognitive mechanisms proposed to underlie ADHD traits in adults: 1) attentional control - the ability to mobilize cognitive resources to stop a prepotent motor response; 2) information sampling/gathering - adequate sampling of information in a stimulus detection task prior to making a decision; and 3) shifting - the ability to adapt behavior in response to positive and negative contingencies.

Methods: This cross-sectional and correlational study recruited 650 adults (330 males) aged 18-69 years (M = 33.

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Disinhibited eating involves overconsumption and loss of control over food intake, and underpins many health conditions, including obesity and binge-eating related disorders. Stress has been implicated in the development and maintenance of disinhibited eating behaviours, but the mechanisms underlying this relationship are unclear. In this systematic review, we examined how the impact of stress on the neurobiological substrates of food-related reward sensitivity, interoception and cognitive control explains its role in disinhibited eating behaviours.

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Article Synopsis
  • About 15%-20% of adults report symptoms of addictive eating, and there are limited management options, with motivational interviewing showing promise for behavior change.
  • This study focuses on a three-arm randomized controlled trial to evaluate a telehealth intervention for addictive eating among Australian adults, comparing it to passive and control groups.
  • Participants will undergo assessments of their addictive eating symptoms, dietary habits, mental health, and more over a period of 6 months, while the main goal is to measure the effectiveness of the intervention through changes in symptoms.
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