Neuropsychopharmacology in Addiction Treatment

There is a great deal of interest in understanding addiction neurobiology and in translating findings from pre-clinical studies to clinical samples. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) represents an important tool in translating pre-clinical insights to brain function in humans affected by addictive disorders. While there has been a focus on developing fMRI-based biomarkers for psychiatric disorders in general (Fu & Costafreda, 2013), the field of addictions has yet to identify reliable biomarkers, fMRI based or otherwise. Importantly, diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers are only as useful as their ability to add value to existing clinical and behavioral systems. Perhaps most promising is the notion that understanding addiction neurobiology at the level of the individual’s brain function will allow for the development of more efficacious treatments, including the prediction of relapse and the test of promising behavioral and pharmacological interventions. In particular, it has been argued that therapies for addiction must target brain structures that are altered by the disorder through neuropsychological and pharmacological interventions (Konova et al., 2013b). Further, studies suggest that functional neuroimaging provides an objective and quantifiable measure for evaluating changes associated with treatment beyond what can be gathered from self-report or behavior alone (Menossi et al., 2013).