AIM: Alcohol, Inflammation and Motivation
"Dismantling Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP): Identifying Critical Neuroimmune Mechanisms of Action"
Alcohol use disorders (AUDs) are associated with great socioeconomic costs in the United States. Despite decades of research, the best treatments have proven to be only modestly successful. Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) and Relapse Prevention (RP) have been shown to help regular alcohol users curb their drinking habits. The goal of the AIM Study is to compare these two effective treatments to see which is more effective at reducing drinking, and to learn more about how they work.
To learn how the interventions work, we compared their effectiveness at targeting the psychological, neurological, and physiological mechanisms that are related to alcohol use disorders. The neurological mechanisms we were interested in are those that result from adaptations to the brain’s structure and function as a result of alcohol use. Alcohol has also been shown to influence levels of inflammation in both the brain and body, and to cause changes to genetic material (DNA) through a process called epigenetics. By monitoring changes in all of these mechanisms, we would be able to see which of the treatments better targets which of these important predictors of recovery from alcohol use disorder.
