Drug Craving: From Neural Mechanisms to Treatment Development

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are chronic-relapsing conditions with remarkably high prevalence and staggering social costs. As a cluster of disorders, they are characterized by craving for drugs and loss of control over drug craving and drug taking behavior. In this talk, I will present select findings from my research program on SUDs, utilizing a variety of basic, clinical, neuroscience, computational, and translational methods. First, I’ll share a recent meta-analysis demonstrating that craving predicts drug use and relapse, underscoring its role as a target of treatment. I will then share neuroimaging findings using meta-analysis and machine learning, identifying brain regions most consistently implicated in craving and revealing a multivariate pattern that predict craving in new participants from their brain activity. Importantly, this neural pattern can also accurately classify individuals with vs. without SUDs, and predicts treatment outcomes, thus serving as the first diagnostic and prognostic neuromarker for SUDs. Next, I will describe our work investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the regulation of craving across drug types and regulation strategies. For example, I will demonstrate that regulation strategies drawn from cognitive-behavioral treatments rely on distinct neural mechanisms from mindfulness-based strategies. I will conclude with recent work developing novel digital interventions focused on the regulation of craving: a mechanism-focused approach that is scalable and accessible for individuals who would not otherwise access traditional treatments.

Dr. Hedy Kober is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

NACS Seminars are free and open to the public.