Addiction Research Consortium: Losing and regaining control over drug intake (ReCoDe)—From trajectories to mechanisms and interventions

Abstract

One of the major risk factors for global death and disability is alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use. While there is increasing knowledge with respect to individual factors promoting the initiation and maintenance of substance use disorders (SUDs), disease trajectories involved in losing and regaining control over drug intake (ReCoDe) are still not well described. Our newly formed German Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) on ReCoDe has an interdisciplinary approach funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with a 12‐year perspective. The main goals of our research consortium are (i) to identify triggers and modifying factors that longitudinally modulate the trajectories of losing and regaining control over drug consumption in real life, (ii) to study underlying behavioral, cognitive, and neurobiological mechanisms, and (iii) to implicate mechanism‐based interventions. These goals will be achieved by: (i) using mobile health (m‐health) tools to longitudinally monitor the effects of triggers (drug cues, stressors, and priming doses) and modify factors (eg, age, gender, physical activity, and cognitive control) on drug consumption patterns in real‐life conditions and in animal models of addiction; (ii) the identification and computational modeling of key mechanisms mediating the effects of such triggers and modifying factors on goal‐directed, habitual, and compulsive aspects of behavior from human studies and animal models; and (iii) developing and testing interventions that specifically target the underlying mechanisms for regaining control over drug intake.

Instrumental and Pavlovian Mechanisms in Alcohol Use Disorder

“…In order to reach this goal, research should aim for longitudinal studies using reliable and ecologically valid paradigms of Pavlovian and instrumental processes with alcohol-related cues and outcomes, which should be combined with state-ofthe-art imaging techniques, computational modeling, and ecological momentary assessment methods that collect real-time craving and substance use data in daily life [313]. This will allow us to better understand how these basic learning mechanisms contribute to the initial development and maintenance of AUD.…”

“…Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) with grants DO1915/3-1 to N.D, SCHL1969/5-1 to F.S., HE2597/14-1, HE2597/14-2 to A.H., and SFB/ TRR 265 (Project-ID 402170461 [313], projects B1 to F.S. and B3 to A.H.) , and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research) with grants 01GQ0411, 01QG87164, NGFN Plus 01GS08152, and 01GS08159.…”

Cocaine addicted rats show reduced neural activity as revealed by manganese-enhanced MRI

“…We thank Dr. Hamid Noori for expert feedbacks. This work was supported by the ERANET grant COCADDICT, by the BMBF (FKZ: 01ZX1909—SysMedSUDs), and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (TRR265—Losing and Regaining Control over Drug Intake 82 .…”

Prospects of Genetics and Epigenetics of Alcohol Use Disorder

“…In general, developing and establishing robust biomarkers and algorithms to predict diagnoses and treatment response necessitates the comprehensive integration of intensive genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, microbiomic, and phenotypic longitudinal data [66]. As sample sizes increase, machine learning approaches can be used as a promising datadriven way to analyze large-scale multi-omics data.…”