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Updated: Mar 26, 2026

Creating Dynamic Images of Short-lived Dopamine Fluctuations with lp-ntPET: Dopamine Movies of Cigarette Smoking
Published on: August 6, 2013
PET imaging for addiction medicine: From neural mechanisms to clinical considerations
Corinde E Wiers1, Elizabeth Cabrera1, Emily Skarda1
1National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Abstract:
Positron emission tomography (PET) has been shown to be an effective imaging technique to study neurometabolic and neurochemical processes involved in addiction. That is, PET has been used to research neurobiological differences in substance abusers versus healthy controls and the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of abused drugs. Over the past years, the research scope has shifted to investigating neurobiological effects of abstinence and treatment, and their predictive power for relapse and other clinical outcomes. This chapter provides an overview of PET methodology, recent human PET studies on drug addiction and their implications for clinical treatment.
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