ReviewNeurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology2018
The alcoholic brain: neural bases of impaired reward-based decision-making in alcohol use disorders.
Review in Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- Reward Processing in Binge Eating and Harmful Drinking: A Systematic Review.The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Pooled it
- Relating Functional Connectivity and Alcohol Use Disorder: A Systematic Review and Derivation of Relevance Maps for Regions and Connections.Human brain mapping · 2025Pooled it
- Meta-analysis of grey matter changes and their behavioral characterization in patients with alcohol use disorder.Scientific reports · 2021Pooled it
- Targeting neuroinflammation with minocycline in heavy drinkers.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Salience network structural integrity predicts executive impairment in alcohol use disorders.Scientific reports · 2018Trial
- Sex-specific neural activation to stress and alcohol cues in high-risk drinkers: links between orbitofrontal circuits, alcohol craving, and future drinking.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of altered loss aversion in alcohol use disorder: preliminary evidence of sex-related differences from 18F-FDG-PET imaging.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Hippocampal Interneurons Shape Spatial Coding Alterations in Neurological Disorders.Molecular neurobiology · 2025Review
- Dysregulated responses to stress and alcohol cues in cortico-striatal-limbic regions in social drinkers with early trauma.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2025Article
- Influence of positive consequences on subsequent incentive ratings and drinking quantity.Addictive behaviors · 2025Article
- Negative affectivity drivers of impulsivity in opioid use disorder.Nature reviews. Psychology · 2025Article
- Altered Effective Connectivity During Threat Anticipation in Individuals With Alcohol Use Disorder.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Impaired arbitration between reward-related decision-making strategies in Alcohol Users compared to Alcohol Non-Users: a computational modeling study.NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience · 2025Article
- Biological aging markers in blood and brain tissue indicate age acceleration in alcohol use disorder.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2024Article
- Appetitive and aversive cue reactivities differentiate neural subtypes of alcohol drinkers.Addiction neuroscience · 2023Article
- Intracranial subsecond dopamine measurements during a "sure bet or gamble" decision-making task in patients with alcohol use disorder suggest diminished dopaminergic signals about relief.Neurosurgical focus · 2023Article
- Electrophysiological Markers of Aberrant Cue-Specific Exploration in Hazardous Drinkers.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Functional Coherence in Intrinsic Frontal Executive Networks Predicts Cognitive Impairments in Alcohol Use Disorder.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- How alcohol and/or tobacco use and raised glycemia are associated with oral hygiene practices among Burkinabè adults: Evidence from the first national non-communicable disease risk factors survey.Preventive medicine reports · 2022Article
- Multi-omics signatures of alcohol use disorder in the dorsal and ventral striatum.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neuroeconomics is providing insights into the neural bases of decision-making in normal and pathological conditions. In the neuropsychiatric domain, this discipline investigates how abnormal functioning of neural systems associated with reward processing and cognitive control promotes different disorders, and whether such evidence may inform treatments. This endeavor is crucial when studying different types of addiction, which share a core promoting mechanism in the imbalance between impulsive subcortical neural signals associated with immediate pleasurable outcomes and inhibitory signals mediated by a prefrontal reflective system. The resulting impairment in behavioral control represents a hallmark of alcohol use disorders (AUDs), a chronic relapsing disorder characterized by excessive alcohol consumption despite devastating consequences. This review aims to summarize available magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) evidence on reward-related decision-making alterations in AUDs, and to envision possible future research directions. We review functional MRI (fMRI) studies using tasks involving monetary rewards, as well as MRI studies relating decision-making parameters to neurostructural gray- or white-matter metrics. The available data suggest that excessive alcohol exposure affects neural signaling within brain networks underlying adaptive behavioral learning via the implementation of prediction errors. Namely, weaker ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity and altered connectivity between ventral striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex likely underpin a shift from goal-directed to habitual actions which, in turn, might underpin compulsive alcohol consumption and relapsing episodes despite adverse consequences. Overall, these data highlight abnormal fronto-striatal connectivity as a candidate neurobiological marker of impaired choice in AUDs. Further studies are needed, however, to unveil its implications in the multiple facets of decision-making.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.