Texas A&M will receive more than $6 million in NIH funding to study how alcohol and cocaine affect cognition. The goal of the study is to improve addiction treatment.
The National Institutes of Health awarded $6.27 million to be utilized over five years for two proposals:
- $3.25 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for a study on cholinergic dysregulation and cognitive flexibility in cocaine use disorder
- $3.02 million from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism will examine cholinergic modulation of striatal circuits in alcohol use disorder
Jun Wang, PhD, with the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine at Texas A&M Health wants to know if these substances can dull cognitive flexibility. He says the idea behind the research is that addiction hijacks the brain in a way that causes loss of cognitive flexibility, which is critical to daily life.
Wang says, “Addiction is often viewed as a disorder of reward, but it is also a disorder of flexibility, and the brain loses the ability to update behavior when circumstances change. This is a key issue because, currently, we think addiction is just exaggerating or enhancing the reward. Normal, non-addicted reward is quite important. It’s important for survival and for motivation. Addiction is just a hijacked rewards pathway.”
He says the hijacking can make the brain less flexible, and flexibility is what enables decision making, task management, problem solving, among others.
“These two grants gave us an opportunity to ask whether alcohol and cocaine, despite being different substances, both disrupt related chronology circuits that support addictive decision-making. That’s actually the core of this study,” Wang said. “The long-term goal is to identify brain circuit mechanisms that could eventually guide new strategies to restore cognitive control in substance use disorders.”