Drug Addictive Action Memory Extinction Based On The Association Between Related Cues And Automatic Drug Use Behavior

A common goal of addiction treatment is to reduce the cue-induced reactivity.After longterm use,the drug use behavior becomes automatic and less affected by cognitive control.Therefore,effective treatment needs to change this automatic drug use behavior,which requires a deeper understanding to the addiction behavior.Based on the previous studies,this study uses the self-report,behavior experiment,Event-Related potentials(ERP),Virtual Reality(VR)technology,physiological index and Approach-Avoidance Training(AAT),to explore the nature and neural mechanism of automatic drug use behavior in heroin addicts under drugassociated cues.On this basis,we try to design effective Training methods and running the training process.Study 1: Self-report,behavior experiment and ERP are used to investigate the nature and neural mechanism of automatic drug use behavior in heroin addicts under drug-associated cues,involving two experiments.Experiment 1,using Craving-Automatized-Scale Substances(CAS-S)to explore the cue-induced reactivity.Experiment 2,using ERP to investigate the nature and neural mechanism of cue induced reactivity which is supposed the tendency of automatic drug use behavior in heroin addicts and prove that the drug use behavior under drugassociated cues is unawareness.On the basis of confirming the hypothesis of study 1,we proceed to the second study.Study 2: VR-AAT training are used to investigate whether this training methods can reduce or diminish the cue-induced reactivity and addictive memory.The result shows that 1)The score of the heroin addicts in the CAS-S is high,and the drug use behavior has the characteristics of "unconscious" and "involuntary",which will become more serious with the increase of the addiction length.2)Within-group analyses in the heroin addicted group showed that the N1 amplitude and latency were smaller and reaction time was poorer perform in response to drug related cues versus neutral cues.Between-group analyses of the ERP data showed that compared to the healthy controls,men who were addicted to heroin demonstrated a smaller N1 in response to drug related cues.Meanwhile,the N1 differences are concentrated in the central regions of the brain.3)After the VR-AAT training,the physiological index decreased significantly and the approach bias was better,and there was no significant difference between the follow-up test and the post-test.We conclude that the drug use behavior in heroin addicts under drug-associated cues is unawareness,and its neural mechanism is sensorimotor and related brain area.On this basis,the VR-AAT training is an effective train to extinct the drug addiction memory.