Craving is considered to play an important role in the persistence of drug use and relapse of drug use. Very few studies have looked into the subjective experience of this phenomena. This study attempts to study craving comprehensively as described by the subjects. In the present study 30 patients of heroin dependence syndrome were assessed (using a semi-structured questionnaire) for the subjec...

BACKGROUND TMS has high potential as smoking cessation treatment. However, the neural mechanisms underlying TMS induced reduction of tobacco craving remain unclear. Electroencephalographic (EEG) delta frequency has been associated with the activity of the dopaminergic brain reward system, which is crucial for nicotine induced effects, and decreases after nicotine admission in smokers. OBJECTI...

BACKGROUND Cocaine dependence is associated with high rates of relapse. Stress and drug cue exposure are known to increase cocaine craving and stress arousal, but the association between these responses and cocaine relapse has not been previously studied. OBJECTIVE To examine whether stress-induced and drug cue-induced cocaine craving and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis responses evoked i...

BACKGROUND Crack cocaine dependence and addiction is typically associated with frequent and intense drug wanting or craving triggered by internal or environmental cues associated with past drug use. METHODS Water O 15 positron emission tomography (PET) studies were used to localize alterations in synaptic activity related to cue-induced drug craving in 8 crack cocaine-dependent African Americ...

Alcohol dependence is associated with a dysregulated dopamine system modulating reward, craving and cognition. The monoamine stabilizer (-)-OSU6162 (OSU6162) can counteract both hyper- and hypo-dopaminergic states and we recently demonstrated that it attenuates alcohol-mediated behaviors in long-term drinking rats. The present Phase II exploratory human laboratory study investigated to our know...

According to learning-based models of behavior, food cue reactivity and craving are conditioned responses that lead to increased eating and subsequent weight gain. However, evidence supporting this relationship has been mixed. We conducted a quantitative meta-analysis to assess the predictive effects of food cue reactivity and craving on eating and weight-related outcomes. Across 69 reported st...

High-sugar/high-fat foods are related to binge-eating behaviour and especially people with low inhibitory control may encounter elevated difficulties to resist their intake. Incentive sensitization to food-related cues might lead to increased motivated attention towards these stimuli and to cue-induced craving. To investigate the combined influence of olfactory and visual stimuli on craving, in...

In the present study, the causal influence of chocolate craving on attentional bias for chocolate-related information was examined by experimentally inducing chocolate craving in a sample of high trait chocolate cravers vs. low trait chocolate cravers. A sample of 35 high trait chocoholics and 33 low trait chocolate cravers were randomly assigned to either the exposure condition in which cravin...

BACKGROUND Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can noninvasively stimulate the brain and transiently amplify or block behaviors mediated through a region. We hypothesized that a single high-frequency rTMS session over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) would reduce cue craving for cigarettes compared with a sham TMS session. METHODS Sixteen non-treatment-seeking, ...

OBJECTIVE Ethanol blocks N-methyl-d-aspartic acid (NMDA) glutamate receptors. Increased NMDA receptor function may contribute to motivational disturbances that contribute to alcoholism. The authors assessed whether the NMDA receptor antagonist memantine reduces cue-induced alcohol craving and produces ethanol-like subjective effects. METHOD Thirty-eight alcohol-dependent inpatients participat...