Active clinical trials for "Alcohol Drinking"

Heavy episodic drinking (HED) among college students remains a concern within the U.S., as rates of HED are still high in this population. Though a variety of brief motivational interventions for alcohol use in college students have demonstrated significant effects, these effects are often small and not consistently maintained over time. Personalized feedback interventions (PFIs) are a particularly promising approach, as these are often acceptable to college students, as well as low-cost, and easy to disseminate. Though presentation of interperson discrepancy via descriptive and injunctive norms has shown consistent effects within PFIs and received much attention in the literature, intraperson, or ideal-actual self discrepancies, has largely been ignored. Drawing from cognitive dissonance theory, self-regulation theory, and motivational interviewing, the current study aims to evaluate the efficacy of an alcohol PFI with a values component to incorporate ideal-self discrepancy into a typical intervention.

The present study will evaluate college students (N=100) from 2- and 4-year colleges/universities between 21-24 years old to assess anxiety, affect, broad social motives (BSM) and peer group influences on drinking and other risk-taking behaviors. This study will employ two sound scientific methods for testing behavior during drinking events (i.e., lab alcohol administration and daily diary) and use novel strategies to compare results of these two methods in the same sample. Using an ad-lib drinking paradigm, students' risk-taking, as measured by the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), will be assessed when alone and during one of two randomly assigned peer group conditions (close friends or new peers). Participants will be allowed to freely drink (within safety limits) with their peer group prior to completing the BART again. These same students will complete daily electronic diaries on four weekends (Thursday - Sunday; total 24 assessments) regarding BSM, motives to drink, peers in their social group, alcohol use and consequences, and if/how their social group changed (e.g., few close friends to large party with many new peers) during the drinking event. Competing hypotheses will be tested such that: 1) anxiety is expected to be a stronger predictor of drinking behavior and greater differences in risk-taking in the new peer condition than close friend condition or 2) BSM is expected to be a stronger predictor of drinking behavior and greater differences in risk-taking in the close friend condition than new peers condition. Results are expected to be replicated in the daily diary reports. Further, this multimethod approach will allow us to evaluate how behavior assessed in the lab predicts naturally occurring behaviors in an uncontrolled setting. For example, the investigators will assess whether greater increases in self-reported risk-taking from baseline to after entering peer groups in the bar lab setting will predict heavier drinking on nights when most drinking companions are close friends reported during daily diary.

New technologies offer potential ways to provide and deliver preventative interventions. With respect to unhealthy alcohol use, offering people tools to assess and manage their risk at any given time using their smartphone may represent an additional opportunity to disseminate preventative interventions. Nevertheless, there is a lack of knowledge on the acceptability and efficacy of smartphone applications for unhealthy alcohol use. Alcooquizz, a smartphone app, has been previously evaluated using a before/after design without randomization, with participants reporting reductions in drinking over time. The current trial proposes to conduct an RCT, comparing reductions in alcohol consumption between participants provided access to Alcooquizz to a no intervention control. Participants will be recruited through Amazon's MTurk crowdsourcing platform. Potential participants identified as problem drinkers based on an initial survey will be invited to complete another survey in 6 months time. Those who agree to be followed-up will be randomized to be provided a link to download the Alcooquizz app or to a no link control condition. At six-months post-baseline, the MTurk portal will be used to send invitation emails that contain a link to the follow-up survey that asks about their drinking and their impressions of the app. The primary hypothesis to be tested is that participants receiving access to the Alcooquizz app will report a greater level of reduction in number of drinks in a typical week between the baseline survey and six-month follow-up as compared to participants in the no information control condition.

There is a need to better understand the mechanisms underlying alcohol use and dependence in order to advance the clinical treatment of alcohol dependence. Here, the investigators will use Positron Emission Tomography to determine if there is an up-regulation of D3 receptors in the brains of subjects with alcohol use disorders. The investigators will also investigate the relationship between D3 binding and major phenotypes associated with alcohol use disorders, namely: alcohol cue induced craving and motivation to self-administer alcohol in the laboratory.

Randomized pilot study of a device (smartphone app) that poses non-significant risk to participants and is exempt from Investigational Device Exemption regulations [21 Code of Federal Regulations 812.2(c)

To determine whether alcoholics (AUD) have a greater rate of amyloid positivity (ABeta+) compared to an age-matched cognitively normal control group (HC).

Unhealthy alcohol use is a major contributor to morbidity and mortality in the US. Although effective prevention for unhealthy alcohol use and medication treatment for alcohol use disorders (AUDs) can be provided in primary care (PC), they have historically not been included in routine services. As a result, most patients do not receive evidence-based prevention or treatment for unhealthy alcohol use. Several efforts have successfully implemented alcohol-related preventive care-referred to as screening and brief intervention (SBI), but efforts to increase treatment of AUDs with medications have been less successful. Moreover, implementation efforts have usually neglected smaller PC practices, in which most PC is provided. The Michigan SPARC trial is a partnership between Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) in Seattle, bringing extensive expertise implementing evidence-based alcohol-related care, and Altarum Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, bringing demonstrated success engaging over 500 small to medium Michigan-based PC practices in effective quality improvement (QI) efforts. The project builds on Altarum's innovative approach to implementing new or improved clinical care using practice facilitators to provide continuing medical education and maintenance of certification (CME/MOC) programs to PC providers, along with ongoing support for QI using evidence-based implementation strategies. The KPWHRI team recently finished the highly successful AHRQ-funded Sustained Patient-centered Alcohol-Related Care (SPARC) trial using similar implementation strategies in KP Washington, including use of electronic health records and performance monitoring and feedback, and also developed a patient decision aid to support shared decision-making between patients with high-risk drinking and/or AUDs and their PC providers. The Michigan SPARC trial combines Altarum's expertise in QI in small-medium PC practices in Michigan with KPWHRI's expertise implementing evidence-based prevention and treatment of unhealthy alcohol use-specifically alcohol SBI and medication treatment for AUDs. Specific Aims of the Michigan SPARC trial had to be markedly modified due to the trial beginning in March 2020 at the same time as the COVID pandemic. A trial was not possible. The revised aims were to describe alcohol screening, brief intervention, AUD diagnosis and initiation of medication treatment for AUD, before and after the Michigan SPARC model was implemented, in small to medium PC practices in Michigan.

The study objective was to evaluate the safety of ten consecutive days of therapeutic acetaminophen dosing in moderate alcohol consumers. The main outcome was liver injury (measured by an increase in mean serum ALT or AST levels). Patients were randomly assigned to 10 days of acetaminophen or placebo. Blood tests were measured at baseline, day 4 and day 11 to look for injury. We hypothesized that there would be no difference in liver enzymes between the two groups.

Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is prevalent, devastating, and difficult to treat. The intransigence of AUD is readily apparent in the Trauma Unit of Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital, wherein 23% of trauma related admissions are associated with alcohol - higher than the national average of 16%. Of these trauma related admissions, over 70% are estimated to have AUD and 41% will be likely be admitted to the trauma unit again within 5 years. While Dr. Veach (Co-Investigator) and her team in the Department of Surgery have demonstrated that a brief counseling intervention on the inpatient trauma unit can decrease morbidity and recidivism, the rates of AUD and relapse to drinking among these individuals remains very high. With a growing knowledge of the neural circuits that contribute to relapse in AUD, there is an emerging interest in developing a novel, neural-circuit specific therapeutic tool to enhance AUD treatment outcomes. This will be achieved through a double-blind, sham-controlled cohort study in heavy alcohol drinkers with a history of alcohol-related injury. The brain reactivity to alcohol cues (Incentive Salience) and cognitive performance in the presence of an alcoholic beverage cue (Cognitive Control) will be measured immediately before and after participants receive real or sham intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS- a potentiating form of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)) to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC iTBS). The goals of this pilot study are to quantify the acute effect of a single session of real or sham dlPFC iTBS on brain response to alcohol cues (Aim 1) and cognitive flexibility in the presence of an alcohol cue (Aim 2) among risky drinkers (target engagement ).

This pilot project is a brief, open-label clinical trial of probiotics as an intervention in heavy drinkers. Heavy drinkers who do not yet show significant signs of liver disease may stand to benefit from probiotics, but no clinical trials to date have addressed this population. This study will recruit heavy drinkers to complete an open-label within-subjects trial. The study will investigate effects of probiotics on specific biomarkers in healthy heavy drinkers who currently are not seeking to change their alcohol use (i.e., are non-treatment-seeking).