Peter Salovey President | Yale University
Peter Salovey President | Yale University
A new study conducted by Yale researchers has found that brain activity related to alcohol craving and heavy drinking differs across sexes, potentially leading to the need for sex-specific therapeutic approaches in treating alcohol use disorder.
The study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe how men and women with alcohol use disorder responded to stress- or alcohol-related images compared to neutral images. Lead researcher Rajita Sinha, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, explained that the study aimed to investigate if stress- and cue-related craving varied between men and women.
Sinha stated, "We found that women reported greater levels of stress after viewing the stress cues than did men. Further, while alcohol cues led to stronger craving in men than the stress cues did, in women, stress and alcohol cues led to the same amount of craving in women."
The study included 77 treatment-seeking adults with alcohol use disorder, with participants rating their stress and alcohol craving levels after viewing different types of images. The researchers discovered that brain circuits associated with emotion, reward, stress regulation, and impulse control responded differently in men and women, with disruptions present in both sexes but in different ways.
Furthermore, the study revealed that the brain regions correlated with future heavy drinking differed between men and women. In women, disruptions in brain regions associated with anxiety were related to future heavy drinking, while in men, it was disruptions in areas linked to high stress arousal.
Sinha emphasized the importance of considering the experiential, biological, and demographic variability across individuals in developing effective treatments for alcohol use disorder and other illnesses. She highlighted the need for targeted therapeutic approaches for men and women, including pharmacological and behavioral treatments.
The findings of this study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, underscore the significance of understanding sex differences in craving and its neural correlates to improve treatment outcomes for individuals with alcohol use disorder.
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