Addiction Biology

Individuals with methamphetamine use disorder (MUD) often experience anxiety and depressive symptoms during abstinence, which can worsen the likelihood of relapse. Thus, it is essential to understand the neuro-mechanism behind methamphetamine use and its associated emotional withdrawal symptoms in order to develop effective clinical strategies. This study aimed to evaluate associations between emotional withdrawal symptoms and structural covariance networks (SCNs) based on cortical thickness (CTh) across the brain...

Polysubstance use (PSU), the use of two or more substances proximally, is highly prevalent and has amplified the risk for morbidity and mortality. However, PSU patterns and associated risk factors are not well characterized. This may be especially relevant to women who are known to be vulnerable to stress/trauma, craving, pain, and anxious and depressive symptoms as associated risk factors for PSU. A cross-sectional observational study was conducted to characterize substance use patterns in women who regularly used cocaine, opioids, marijuana, alcohol, benzodiazepines and/or nicotine and were being assessed for a placebo-controlled study of guanfacine treatment (n = 94; ages 19-65)...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) remains one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders worldwide with high economic costs. Current treatment options show modest efficacy and relapse rates are high. Furthermore, there are increases in the treatment gap and few new medications have been approved in the past 20 years. Recently, psychedelic-assisted therapy with psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide has garnered significant attention in the treatment of AUD. Yet, they require significant amounts of therapist input due to prolonged subjective effects (~4-12 h) leading to high costs and impeding implementation...

One of the leading drug addiction theories states that habits and the underlying neural process of a ventral to dorsal striatal shift are the building blocks of compulsive drug-seeking behaviour and that compulsion is the maladaptive persistence of responding despite adverse consequences. Here we discuss that compulsive behaviour as defined primarily from the perspective of animal experimentation falls short of the clinical phenomena and their neurobiological correlates. Thus for the human condition, the concept of compulsive habbits should be critically addressed and potentially revised...

Suicide attempts (SA) are prevalent in substance use disorders (SUD). Epigenetic mechanisms may play a pivotal role in the molecular mechanisms of environmental effects eliciting suicidal behaviour in this population. Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), oxytocin and neurotrophin pathways have been consistently involved in SA, yet , their interplay with childhood adversity remains unclear, particularly in SUD. In 24 outpatients with SUDs, we examined the relation between three parental dysfunctional styles and history of SA with methylation of 32 genes from these pathways, eventually analysing 823 methylation sites...

Video game addiction (VGA) is associated with cognitive problems, particularly deficits in inhibitory control. The present study aimed to investigate behavioural responses and event-related potential associated with specific response inhibition using the cued Go/NoGo task to examine the effects of VGA on brain activity related to response inhibition. Twenty-five individuals addicted to video games (action video games) and 25 matched healthy controls participated in the study. The results showed that the VGA group had significantly more commission error in the NoGo trials and faster reaction time in the Go trials compared with the control group...

With the advent of digital technologies, online sports betting is spurring a fast-growing expansion. In this study, we examined how sports betting availability modulates the brain connectivity of frequent sports bettors with [problem bettors (PB)] or without [non-problem bettors (NPB)] problematic sports betting. We conducted functional connectivity analyses centred on the ventral anterior insular cortex (vAI), a brain region playing a key role in the dynamic interplay between reward-based processes. We re-analysed a dataset on sports betting availability undertaken in PB (n = 30) and NPB (n = 35)...

Structural neuroplasticity of the hippocampus in the form of neurogenesis and dendritic remodelling underlying morphine tolerance is still less known. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to assess whether unconditioned- and conditioned-morphine tolerance can trigger structural neuroplasticity in the dorsal and ventral parts of the adult male rat hippocampus. Evaluation of the levels of neurogenesis markers (Ki67 and DCX) by immunohistochemistry shows that conditioned morphine tolerance is sufficient to increase the baseline topographic level of hippocampal neurogenesis in adult rats...

Problem alcohol drinking continues to be a substantial cost and burden. In addition, alcohol consumption in women has increased in recent decades, and women can have greater alcohol problems and comorbidities. Thus, there is a significant need for novel therapeutics to enhance sex-specific, individualized treatment. Heart rate (HR) and HR variability (HRV) are of broad interest because they may be both biomarkers for and drivers of pathological states. HRV reflects the dynamic balance between sympathetic (SNS, 'fight or flight') and parasympathetic (PNS, 'rest and digest') systems...

Protein kinase C epsilon (PKCε) regulates behavioural responses to ethanol and plays a role in anxiety-like behaviour, but knowledge is limited on downstream substrates of PKCε that contribute to these behaviours. We recently identified brain-specific serine/threonine-protein kinase 1 (BRSK1) as a substrate of PKCε. Here, we test the hypothesis that BRSK1 mediates responses to ethanol and anxiety-like behaviours that are also PKCε dependent. We used in vitro kinase assays to further validate BRSK1 as a substrate of PKCε and used Brsk1-/- mice to assess the role of BRSK1 in ethanol- and anxiety-related behaviours and in physiological responses to ethanol...

Repeated abuse of methamphetamine (METH) can cause dependence, repeated relapse of psychotic symptoms, compulsive drug-seeking behaviour, and various neurological symptoms. These long-term biological changes may be associated with epigenetic mechanisms; however, the association between METH use and epigenetic mechanisms has been poorly investigated. Thus, we performed an epigenome-wide association study of METH dependence using genomic DNA extracted from the blood samples of 24 patients with METH dependence and 24 normal controls...

A network meta-analysis (NMA) including randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was conducted to evaluate the effects of different interventions on smoking cessation. Studies were collected from online databases including PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Eligible studies were further examined in the NMA to compare the effect of 14 interventions on smoking cessation. Thirty-four studies were examined in the NMA, including a total of 14 interventions and 28 733 participants...

Alcohol consumption is popular worldwidely and closely associated with cardiovascular diseases. Influences of paternal preconception alcohol consumption on offspring cerebral arteries are largely unknown. Male rats were randomly given alcohol or water before being mated with alcohol-naive females to produce alcohol- and control-sired offspring. Middle cerebral artery (MCA) was tested with a Danish Myo Technology wire myograph, patch-clamp, IONOPTIX, immunofluorescence and quantitative PCR. Alcohol consumption enhanced angiotensin II (AngII)-mediated constriction in male offspring MCA mainly via AT1R...

Methamphetamine (METH) is a highly addictive psycho-stimulant that induces addictive behaviour by stimulating increased dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). The sarco/endoplasmic reticulum calcium ion transport ATPases (SERCA or ATP2A) is a calcium ion (Ca2+) pump in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane. SERCA2b is a SERCA subtype mainly distributed in the central nervous system. This study used conditioned place preference (CPP), a translational drug reward model, to observe the effects of SERCA and SERCA2b on METH-CPP in mice...

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Recent studies found that non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) played crucial roles in drug addiction through epigenetic regulation of gene expression and underlying drug-induced neuroadaptations. In this study, we characterized lncRNA transcriptome profiles in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) of mice exhibiting morphine-conditioned place preference (CPP) and explored the prospective roles of novel differentially expressed lncRNA, lncLingo2 and its derived miR-876-5p in the acquisition of opioids-associated behaviours. We found that the lncLingo2 was downregulated within the NAc core (NAcC) but not in the NAc shell (NAcS)...

BACKGROUND: Alexithymia, difficulty in recognising and naming emotions, is common among people who use alcohol. There is also emerging evidence that people with alexithymia are unable to distinguish emotions from non-emotional physiological states. The project aimed to test if alcohol use is related to the way student drinkers experience emotions and physiological states in the body. METHODS: We employed a novel method to study bodily sensations related to emotions and physiological states in the context of alcohol use: the emBODY tool, which allowed participants to mark areas of the body in which they experience various emotions and physiological states...

Online poker gambling (OPG) involves various executive control processes and emotion regulation. In this context, we hypothesized that online poker players, accustomed to handling virtual cards, would show high performance on computerized decision-making tasks such as the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Using press advertisements, we recruited a non-gambler group (NG; n = 20) and an OPG group (n = 22). All participants performed the IGT while their cerebral activity was recorded by electroencephalography...

BACKGROUND: The relationship between fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) index and all-cause mortality in critically ill patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) is unclear. The present study aimed to investigate the predictive ability of FIB-4 for all-cause mortality in critically ill AUD patients and the association between them. METHODS: A total of 2528 AUD patients were included using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) database. FIB-4 was calculated for each patient using the existing formula...

Long-term use of methamphetamine (meth) causes cognitive and neuropsychological impairments. Analysing the impact of this substance on the human brain can aid prevention and treatment efforts. In this study, the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of meth abusers in the abstinence period and healthy subjects were recorded during eyes-closed and eyes-opened states to distinguish the brain regions that meth can significantly influence. In addition, a decision support system (DSS) was introduced as a complementary method to recognize substance users accompanied by biochemical tests...