NCT02486900

Neurofeedback & Alcohol Dependence

Real-time fMRI Neurofeedback as a Treatment Tool for Alcohol Dependence

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 52 (actual)
• Sponsor: Cardiff University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The study aims to examine whether the neurofeedback method (based on functional magnetic resonance imaging \[fMRI\]) can help patients with alcohol dependence to control their urges to drink alcohol and thus to remain abstinent. Potential effects of neurofeedback on abstinence and drinking behaviour will be evaluated based on the comparison between a group of patients receiving multiple sessions of neurofeedback training and a group of patients receiving treatment as usual over the same period of time.

Detailed description

Neurofeedback is a non-invasive neuroscientific tool in which participants receive real-time feedback about their brain activity while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Previous research has shown that participants can successfully use the feedback to self-regulate their brain responses. In this study patients who have successfully completed a detoxification programme will be trained to down-regulate/upregulate responses of motivational brain regions that are activated during exposure to alcohol/life goal-related stimuli (pictures of alcoholic drinks/life goals related). The investigators hypothesise that learning to self-regulate these neural responses will enable patients to better control craving responses to environmental alcohol cues after detoxification treatment. Patients in the intervention group will undergo 6 neurofeedback training sessions, spread across 4 months. Outcomes of the training will be compared with a group of patients who will not do the neurofeedback training but receive standard treatment (e.g. support groups and medication).

Conditions

• Alcohol Dependence

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	fMRI-based neurofeedback	During scanning patients will be exposed to picture stimuli (showing alcoholic drinks and life goals) projected on a screen behind the scanner and viewed through a mirror attached on the MRI head coil. In each session patients will be trained to down-regulate/up-regulate activation levels in brain areas that show reliable responses to the alcohol/life goals pictures in a 'localiser' scan. Self-regulation of these brain responses will then be guided by real-time feedback of alcohol/life goals-cue elicited activation, consisting of changes in the visible alcohol/life goals picture (decreasing size = successful down-regulation; increasing size = successful upregulation). Functional MRI data will be acquired in short blocks having a duration of 5-8 minutes.

Timeline

• Start date: 2015-09-01
• Primary completion: 2018-01-01
• Completion: 2018-08-01
• First posted: 2015-07-01
• Last updated: 2019-02-01

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom