Current Projects
Administrative Core
The CTNA places a high priority on maintaining an efficient flow of information in order to promote the safe and successful completion of proposed studies, to support the initiation of novel pilot studies, to facilitate the career development of trainees and junior faculty affiliated with the Center, and to promote the dissemination of research advances.
Clinical Core
The Clinical Core has established common methodologies to facilitate cognitive and clinical research domains and allow us to compare and pool data across projects for secondary analyses to help us define issues of vulerability.
The goal of the Genetics Core is to support the genetic components of each of the projects participating in this Center to help understand the nature of genetic influences on the phenotypes measured, and to allow for the ascertainment of genetic covariates that might affect those outcomes.
This project is designed to assess effects of alcohol challenge and a monetary incentive delay task (MIDT) on dopamine release as measured with [11C]raclopride displacement.
This Project builds from our original CTNA Project to explore the hypothesis that individuals with a family history positive for alcohol dependence (FHP), experience an alteration in the reward valence of ethanol (more positive effects and reduced negative effects) compared to family history negative (FHN) age-matched subjects.
This study will determine whether FHP healthy subjects and FHP alcohol dependent patients show deficits in ventral striatal activation associated with the anticipation of reward.
CTNA-1 described evidence that enhanced NMDA receptor function associated with alcohol dependence may increase risk for heavy drinking. This project evaluates the dose-related efficacy of memantine in reducing alcohol consumption in FHP/FHN alcohol dependent patients.
The Pilot Projects Core, directed by Dr. John Krystal, provides a mechanism to initiate smallscale investigations that implement new technologies or to test important hypotheses associated with the CTNA mission.