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Event-related potentials and cue-reactivity in alcoholism
M J Herrmann1, H G Weijers, G A Wiesbeck
1Psychiatric Neurophysiology, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Wuerzburg, Germany. martin.herrmann@mail.uni-wuerzburg.de
Background:
Relapse is a major problem in the treatment of addictive behaviors. Conditioning models of alcohol addiction suggest that stimuli associated with previous drug use (cues) may initiate relapse in a definite group of alcoholics. Event-related potentials (ERPs) might be useful to reveal the brain functional substrates of cue-reactivity.
Methods:
In a preliminary investigation, 11 alcohol-dependent patients who did not take part in the electrophysiological study completed a structured interview to rate 80 words as to the degree of relatedness to alcohol. Based on these results, cue-reactivity for 15 alcohol-related and 15 unrelated word cues, each repeated eight times, was investigated in 19 alcohol-dependent men (44.2 +/- 8.5 years) and 19 healthy control men (42.5 +/- 12.5 years).
Results:
A cue-reactivity that consisted of significantly higher amplitudes in the ERPs after alcohol-related words compared with unrelated words was found in alcohol-dependent patients, but not in controls, at the electrode location Pz [F(1,36) = 5.2,p < 0.05].
Conclusions:
Consistent with the hypothesis, only alcohol-dependent patients were characterized by signs of increased cerebral activity associated with alcohol-related compared with unrelated cues. Therefore, the results support the concept of cue-reactivity in alcoholism based on a neurobiological measurement. Future investigations will show whether this cue-reactivity can be applied to assess the risk of relapse in individual alcohol-dependent patients.