Rainer Spanagel, Daniel Durstewitz, Anita Hansson, Andreas Heinz, Falk Kiefer, Georg Köhr, Franziska Matthäus, Markus M Nöthen, Hamid R Noori, Klaus Obermayer, Marcella Rietschel, Patrick Schloss, Henrike Scholz, Gunter Schumann, Michael Smolka, Wolfgang Sommer, Valentina Vengeliene, Henrik Walter, Wolfgang Wurst, Uli S Zimmermann, Sven Stringer, Yannick Smits, Eske M Derks
According to the World Health Organization, about 2 billion people drink alcohol. Excessive alcohol consumption can result in alcohol addiction, which is one of the most prevalent neuropsychiatric diseases afflicting our society today. Prevention and intervention of alcohol binging in adolescents and treatment of alcoholism are major unmet challenges affecting our health-care system and society alike. Our newly formed German SysMedAlcoholism consortium is using a new systems medicine approach and intends (1) to define individual neurobehavioral risk profiles in adolescents that are predictive of alcohol use disorders later in life and (2) to identify new pharmacological targets and molecules for the treatment of alcoholism...
November 2013: Addiction Biology