Abstract

Alcohol-dependent patients commonly show impairments in executive functions that facilitate craving and can lead to relapse. However, the molecular mechanisms leading to executive dysfunction in alcoholism are poorly understood and new effective pharmacological treatments that can easily be translated into the clinic are desired. This talk will focus on recent preclinical data that identified molecular alterations in alcoholism, responsible for both impaired executive control and alcohol craving. In the search for a pharmacological intervention with high translational potential, psychedelics were capable of restoring molecular deficits and reducing relapse behavior. Finally, we developed a FDG-PET biomarker to identify those individuals that respond to psychedelic interventions.