Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AGING MATTERS (Aging Brain Matter; a developmental key to addiction risk and resilience)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-03-01 al 2024-08-31
Despite neuroscientific advances and innovative treatment efforts, for most people addiction remains chronic. Adolescence marks rapid surges in alcohol and cannabis addiction, but also remarkable recovery rates, as most adolescent addictions naturally resolve over time. Brain development holds an important key to understanding the brain’s recovery potential. However, the impact of age on the mechanisms underlying addiction is largely unknown. Capitalizing on adolescents’ unique socio-cognitive sensitivity and learning flexibility, this project aims to unravel common and unique mechanisms of addiction risk and resilience in adolescents and adults. At the core of this innovative developmental-translational research line is a 3-year longitudinal neuroimaging study in adolescent and adult alcohol and cannabis users. This study will uncover the predictive value of social attunement, motivation, self-control and the brain systems underlying changes in use and problem severity over time. Using the same neuroimaging paradigm, causality will be evaluated in rats that start using alcohol and cannabis either during adolescence or adulthood. Finally, a third set of studies will focus on the development of new methods to capture the complex role of social context in pulling adolescents towards and young adults away from alcohol and cannabis use. Ultimately, these studies will lead to a long-sought socio-cognitive developmental framework of addiction, including novel markers of risk and resilience and novel paradigms to study the role of social context in addiction. This approach effectively addresses multiple research gaps at once and the theoretical and methodological advances made through this high-risk-high-gain proposal will not only advance addiction knowledge and treatment, but also set the stage for a new approach to solving psychopathology: an approach in which aging brain matter matters.
Data is currently being collected for the core longitudinal neuoimaging studie. In preparation and alongside, multiple measures have been developed and validated to allow better translation of human-animal findings and to capture the complex role of social context in addiction risk and resilience. An olfactory alcohol cue-reactivity task and cannabis cue-reactivity task were developed that could be used in both humans and rodents while brain activity is recorded. Regarding the olfactory alcohol cue-reactivity task, our first study indicated higher alcohol odor cue-reactivity in mesolimbic areas and higher craving in adolescents compared to adults with an Alcohol Use Disorder, suggesting adolescent risk, rather than resilience. The new measures to capture the role of social context in addiction risk and resilience that were developed include the explicit Social Attunement Questionnaire (SAQ) and the Implicit Social Attunement (ISA) task. Both measures aim to capture the extent to which individuals attune their social behavior to the behavior of their peers. Social attunement is generally higher in adolescents and young adults compared to adults. In line with our social plasticity hypothesis, our first studies using the explicit SAQ indicate that higher social attunement positively related to problematic alcohol use in adolescents and negatively in adults. Moreover, social attunement predicted 2-year escalation of alcohol use in adolescents, but de-escalation in adults. However, results from the ISA indicate the relationships are more nuanced; those adolescents and young adults who attune strongest to low peer willingness to drink have lower alcohol use related problems. The project team also developed and tested a neuroimaging social alcohol cue-reactivity task (S-ACT). We recorded brain activity while low-to-high-drinking adolescents and adults viewed images of alcohol use in social and non-social settings. As hypothesized, age moderated the associations of social alcohol cue-reactivity with recent alcohol consumption, craving, and social attunement. In sum, social attunement may be a risk factor during adolescence, but a protective factor during adulthood. However, peer feedback regarding alcohol use might both act as a protective or risk factor for alcohol use depending on the social setting, warranting more studies. Social attunement in the context of cannabis use is currently being tested.
Capitalizing on the developing brain as a key to understanding risk and resilience, this project aims to unravel the role of age in the fundamental processes underlying addiction. Focusing on the two most prevalent Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) during young adulthood, cannabis and alcohol, we developed a developmental-translational approach incorporating social science, cognitive science and neuroscience that will ultimately lead to i) a long-sought experimentally validated socio-cognitive developmental framework of addiction, including ii) novel markers of risk and resilience that may help to advance prevention and treatment, and iii) state-of-the-art methods to study the role of social context in addiction.