Active clinical trials for "Alcoholism"

This study will examine the impact of functional near-infrared spectroscopy-based neurofeedback to a region within the brain's prefrontal cortex involved with self-regulation of resisting craving in alcohol use and prescription opioid use disorder patients. Participants will be asked to complete two cue reactivity tasks, six sessions of neurofeedback training as well as craving visual analog scales and self-efficacy questionnaires throughout a two-week period of their time in residential treatment at the Caron Treatment Center. They will be followed for 90 days after treatment completion at Caron to assess the impact neurofeedback had on their ability to remain sober once patients are living back in the "real world".

This is a multi-center prospective comparative cohort study examining the safety, efficacy, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacogenomics of naltrexone for pregnant women with opioid use disorder. Pregnancy, delivery, and maternal and infant outcomes to 12 months post-delivery will be examined and compared with a cohort treated with buprenorphine/naloxone.

The rate of relapse following an inpatient alcohol rehabilitation program has been around 50% for a number of years. Offered treatments mainly focus on conscious and controllable aspects of behaviour, but research has found that much of the craving in addiction is guided by automatic processes, which are for a large part unconscious and poorly controlled by the individual. One way to influence these automatic processes is by applying cognitive bias modification, a cognitive-behavioural intervention that can be applied by a computer application. In alcohol addition, a common cognitive bias is the Alcohol-Approach bias. The Anti-Alcohol Training is a form of cognitive bias modification that was developed to reduce this approach bias and it has been shown to reduce the rates of relapse by 4-8%. A drawback of the training is that patients do not continue this at home after discharge. One way to increase accessibility is to offer the training in an app-game form. In this study the investigators have developed a smartphone based training app that allows patients to more easily use the Anti-Alcohol training at home after discharge. The study aims to assess whether use of the app further reduces the alcohol bias and whether it can reduce yearly relapse rates.

Early trauma is associated with clinical challenges in treatment alcoholism, including complex clinical symptoms and higher relapse rates. To better understand this phenomena, this study will examine the neurobiological mechanisms underlying alcoholism, early trauma, and high relapse risk. The current study utilizes a multimodal neuroimaging technique combining brain and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) measures in a prospective clinical outcome design.

The purpose of this study is to see if stimulation of the vagus nerve via a non-invasive device placed behind external ear can reduce physical and psychological discomfort during acute alcohol withdrawal in patients with alcohol use disorder when people just stop drinking alcohol and in detoxification stage.

This proposed research seeks to examine the behavioral and neural substrates of intranasal oxytocin compared to placebo on alcohol cue-induced alcohol and cigarette craving smokers with an alcohol use disorder (AUD). Non treatment-seeking smokers with an AUD will be recruited to participate in a between-subjects, placebo-controlled, randomized pilot functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Participants will undergo an fMRI scan in conjunction with an alcohol-olfactory cue-reactivity task. Secondary assessments will include alcohol and cigarette craving, alcohol and cigarette consumption, physiological measures (heart rate and blood pressure) and mood measures.

This Stage II Randomized Efficacy Trial will compare the effectiveness of a theoretically informed and culturally responsive brief motivational intervention to a non-adapted brief intervention among non-treatment seeking Latinxs admitted for medical treatment of an injury who engage in at risk drinking or were drinking at the time of their injury. The culturally informed brief motivational intervention (CI-BMI) increases autonomous motivation to engage in protective drinking behavior and reduce alcohol problems while addressing barriers to help seeking and facilitating treatment utilization. This project will address the alcohol related health disparities and treatment inequities among Latinx who are more likely to experience alcohol problems yet less likely to receive treatment in order to reduce the negative public health impact of alcohol.

Low utilization of addiction treatment is a public health problem. A number of factors are associated with lack of treatment, including public stigma, self-stigma, and beliefs that people with addiction should solve their problem on their own. Stigma exposes individuals to social rejection, which may sustain the anxiety of rejection, and exacerbate certain mental disorders such as addictions. Social cognition disorders have been shown to be present in addictions, but one dimension of social cognition, emotional sensitivity to rejection (ESR), has been less studied. Rejection sensitivity could be considered a critical element in access to care and the relapse process. The study authors hypothesize a role for emotional dysregulation in rejection situations in the relapse of alcohol use disorder in recently withdrawn patients. Specifically, they hypothesize that participants with a greater change in negative experience after a rejection situation on a Cyberball task, as measured by the negative subscale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), will have a higher percentage of days with heavy drinking during the last four weeks to three months of follow-up.

Over the past few years, researchers and clinicians have stressed the major role of executive and social cognition impairments in the development and the maintenance of Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD). Executive functions are defined as functions for behavioral control that help us to adjust the investigator's behavior in a flexible way in non-familiar, non-routine situations. Executive functions encompass different cognitive processes, such as inhibition, mental flexibility, updating, planification, abstraction, rule deduction or organization. Studies comparing AUD patients to healthy controls have shown that AUD usually is associated with a large range of deficits. More recently studies have also emphasized a weakness of executive functioning among healthy participants with a positive family history of AUD. Social cognition refers to all cognitive processes that enable us to communicate and to interact with social environment in an appropriate manner. Among the most common social cognition sub-components are theory of mind (defined as the capacity to understand other people's mental states as for instance beliefs and desires), empathy, and emotion recognition. Emotional and interpersonal difficulties have a high prevalence in AUD and chronic alcohol consumption is often linked to social conflicts, misunderstandings, a lack of social support and isolation. Indeed, AUD patients have difficulties in understanding their own mental states and emotions as well as those of their social environment. Few studies have investigated the interdependency between these cognitive impairments in AUD while a better understanding of the link between executive functions and social cognition seems crucial in order to better characterize the nature of AUD patients' deficits and thus their caring.

The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the effects of acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR), 3 g daily, and matched placebo on alcohol cue-elicited alcohol craving during a human laboratory paradigm after 4 weeks of daily dosing among participants ages 14-20 with alcohol use disorder (AUD) as confirmed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fifth Edition (DSM-5™) and who report at least mild depressive symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory-II. Secondary objectives include evaluation of ALCAR (3g/day) and matched placebo on alcohol craving and use, subjective effects of alcohol consumption, mood, sleep, alcohol use negative consequences, study retention, and safety and tolerability.