A person with alcoholism engages in risky or dangerous drinking despite experiencing serious negative physical and social consequences. Such persistence in pursuing damaging behaviors suggests that the short-term “appetitive” results of drinking (such as intoxication and losing one’s inhibitions) have greater control over the alcoholic’s behavior than do the negative consequences. From a...
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Translating Alcohol Research: Opportunities and Challenges
More than 20 years ago, Daniel Koshland compared basic with applied research, stating: “Basic research is the type that is not always practical but often leads to great discoveries. Applied research refines these discoveries into useful products” (Koshland 1993). This statement implies that basic science does not have a direct impact on human health and disease or patient outcome but offers the...
Alcohol consumption during pregnancy can interfere with both embryonic and fetal development, producing a wide range of outcomes that fall under the rubric of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). FASD is the nondiagnostic umbrella term used to refer to the full range of effects that can occur following prenatal alcohol exposure. Such exposure can produce a variety of effects, including...
Long-lasting changes in synaptic function (i.e., synaptic plasticity) have long been thought to contribute to information storage in the nervous system (Kandel et al. 2014; Lovinger 2010). Studies combining behavioral and physiological analyses offer strong evidence supporting this hypothesis (Kandel et al. 2014; Ramirez et al. 2014). On the one hand, this plasticity allows the organism to adapt...
Neuroplasticity and Predictors of Alcohol Recovery
Recovery from alcoholism is a complex and long-term process with high relapse rates. Therefore, understanding why people relapse has been critically important to improving treatment outcomes. To that end, researchers are looking for clinical and biological markers that predict relapse after treatment and to use those risk factors to develop effective treatments to reduce relapse rates. One...
Advances in human neuroimaging have expanded our ability to understand the functioning of the brain, with particular recent advances fostering our analytic capacity to examine networks between the brain’s nerve cells (i.e., neurons) and neuroconnectivity (i.e., neural networks). Relevant to the field of alcoholism, several researchers recently have applied these strategies to groups at genetic...
Epidemiology of Recovery From Alcohol Use Disorder
Almost one-third of the U.S. population meets alcohol use disorder (AUD) criteria on a lifetime basis. This review provides an overview of recent research on the prevalence and patterns of alcohol-related improvement and selectively reviews nationally representative surveys and studies that followed risk groups longitudinally with a goal of informing patients with AUD and AUD researchers...
Sex and Gender Effects in Recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder
The current article provides a brief summary of biopsychosocial gender differences in alcohol use disorder (AUD), then reviews existing literature on gender differences in treatment access, retention, outcomes, and longer-term recovery. Among psychotherapies for AUD, there is support for the efficacy of providing female-specific treatment, and for female-only treatment settings but only when...
Immune Function Genes, Genetics, and the Neurobiology of Addiction
The nervous system and the immune system interact closely to regulate the body’s immune responses, including inflammatory responses. Accordingly, the term “neuroimmune system” refers to the immune system and those components of the nervous system that help regulate immune responses and also encompasses the hormones and other signaling molecules that convey signals between the immune and nervous...
Circadian Genes, the Stress Axis, and Alcoholism
Alcohol abuse and dependence are estimated to affect 1 in 8 adults in the United States and several hundred million people worldwide (Grant et al. 2004). To define at-risk populations and develop better treatments, it is important to further identify the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to alcohol addiction. Recent evidence suggests that the body’s internal system that helps...