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Wednesday, April 19, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Alcohol dependence relates to impulse-control deficiency
By Steve Ltndeberg
OSU College of Liberal Arts
CORVALLIS — Would
you rather receive $55 today
or $75 two months from now?
If you chose the former —
and if you’re severely alco-
hol dependent — functional
magnetic resonance imaging
would likely show that you
hadn’t activated the “cognitive
control” region of your brain
as much as someone with a
lower level of dependency
would have.
Research at Oregon State
University sheds new light
on what happens in the brain
when a person with alcohol
use disorder, or AUD, is pre-
sented with an opportunity for
“delay discounting” – forgoing
a larger reward later in favor
of a significantly smaller one
sooner.
The findings are important
because they suggest that more
effective AUD treatment could
involve neuropsychological
tasks designed to help patients
train themselves to make
more-reasoned, better-planned
decisions by using cognitive
control to rein in impulses.
The collaboration among
psychological scientist Anita
Cservenka of OSU’s College
of Liberal Arts and researchers
at UCLA involved 17 alcohol-
dependent individuals making
decisions similar to the $55 vs.
$75 choice while their brain
activity was monitored with
functional magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI.
As they lay still in the MRI
tube, each subject read a series
of 27 questions on a screen
and had five seconds per ques-
tion to answer via an elec-
tronic pad resting on his or her
stomach. Choosing a smaller
amount of money sooner was
categorized as an SS response;
a larger amount later was clas-
sified as LL.
On average, participants
gave an SS response not quite
two-thirds of the time.
“If you just look at the
behavior of individuals, those
with more severe alcohol use
disorder had a trend toward
steeper delay discounting,”
Cservenka said. “How much
they preferred smaller, imme-
diate rewards was not signifi-
cant, but it was a trend; the
severity of the alcohol use
disorder was positively asso-
ciated with the wanting of
smaller, immediate rewards.”
The fMRI scans showed
that in the brains of alcohol-
dependent people, severity of
dependence negatively corre-
lates with activity in the cogni-
tive control regions when par-
ticipants make impulsive deci-
sions – the more dependent
someone is, the less active the
control part of his brain is.
Most people are nattrally
driven to rewards, btt in
certain disorders stch as
AUD there’s a tendency
to display even greater
orientation toward
‘meaningftl’ rewards.
— Anita Cservenka
The scans also indicated
dysregulation in other regions
associated with decision mak-
ing and higher-order cogni-
tion. The alcohol-dependent
individuals showed greater
activation of the brain’s
reward-evaluation regions
during “delayed decisions” –
choosing the larger, later prize.
Activation of those regions
during delayed decisions is
positively associated with
alcohol dependence severity,
suggesting individuals with
greater dependence may need
to activate those areas more to
make less impulsive decisions.
“Most people are naturally
driven to rewards, but in cer-
tain disorders such as AUD
there’s a tendency to dis-
play even greater orientation
toward ‘meaningful’ rewards,”
Cservenka said. “For example,
someone with alcohol use
disorder might display much
greater orientation to an adver-
tisement for alcohol than an
individual who did not have
that disorder. However, in
this study we found deficits in
cognitive control may be more
related to impulsive decision
making than reward-driven
behavior.”
Cservenka notes that impul-
sivity tends to decline with age
but that adults with severe
alcohol use disorder can show
heightened levels of impulsiv-
ity compared to individuals
without alcohol use problems.
“That’s one of the key
research questions: Were these
individuals who have severe
alcohol use disorder especially
impulsive as children, prior
to the onset of dependency?”
PHOTO PROVIDED
Psychological scientist Anita
Cservenka.
she said. “It could very well
be that more impulsive indi-
viduals have more of a ten-
dency to engage in problem
drinking. That’s something
that long-term studies that
track individuals over time are
aiming to answer: How much
is impulsivity a predictor of
alcohol use disorder severity
as opposed to it being a result
of using alcohol?”
Findings were recently
published in the journal Alco-
hol and Alcoholism.
The Foundation for Alco-
hol Research, the National
Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism, and the National
Institute on Drug Abuse sup-
ported this research.
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