Sabine Hoffmann

• Magister
• Central Institute of Mental Health

According to data from the Federal Statistical Office, the diagnosis of alcohol use disorder (AUD) (F 10) is the second most common main diagnosis for hospital treatment. Those affected by this disorder are often repeatedly hospitalized at short intervals due to relapses; however, little is known about the factors that influence readmission rates a...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund Langzeitbetrachtungen der Alkoholabhängigkeit können Aufschluss zu Ätiologie, Prävention und therapeutischer Versorgung bieten. Ziel Beschreibung empirischer Befunde zur Entwicklung in eine Alkoholabhängigkeit hinein und Entwicklungen aus ihr heraus. Methodik Narrative Literaturrecherche, Analyse von Ergebnissen aus K...

Background Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with increased mortality and morbidity risk. A reason for this could be accelerated biological aging, which is strongly influenced by disease processes such as inflammation. As recent studies of AUD show changes in DNA methylation and gene expression in neuroinflammation‐related pathways in the br...

Rationale Cue-exposure therapy (CET) consists of exposing patients to the cause of their affliction in a controlled environment and after psychological preparation. Ever since it was conceived, it has been suggested as a treatment for different types of behavioural impairments, from anxiety disorders to substance abuse. In the field of addictive be...

Objective: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) constitutes a critical public health issue and has sex-specific characteristics. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone and estradiol might reduce or increase alcohol intake, respectively. However, there is a need for a better understanding of how the menstrual cycle in females and the ratio of progestero...

Zusammenfassung: Zielsetzung: Die Restriktionen während der SARS-CoV-2-Pandemie hatten massive Auswirkungen auf den Alltag der Allgemeinbevölkerung. Ein vermehrter Alkohol- oder Tabakkonsum stellte in dieser Situation eine mögliche Bewältigungsstrategie im Umgang mit den unangenehm erlebten Gefühlen dar. In dieser Studie untersuchten wir die Veränd...

Background Alcohol use disorder (AUD) has become a major global health problem. Therapy for this condition is still a great challenge. Recently, it has become increasingly evident that computer-based training is a valuable addition to the treatment of addictive disorders. Objective This study aims to evaluate the web-based serious game SALIENCE (S...

Background Alcohol consumption to facilitate social interaction is an important drinking motive. Here, we tested whether alcohol influences trust in others via modulation of oxytocin and/or androgens. We also aimed at confirming previously shown alcohol effects on positive affect and risk-taking, because of their role in facilitating social interac...

Background: Stress and alcohol cues trigger alcohol consumption and relapse in alcohol use disorder (AUD). However, the neurobiological processes underlying their interaction are only little understood. Thus, we conducted a randomized, controlled neuroimaging study to investigate the effects of psychosocial stress on neural cue-reactivity and addi...

Craving for alcohol is an important diagnostic criterion in alcohol use disorder (AUD) and an established predictor of future relapse. The 5-item Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS) is one of the most widely used questionnaires to quantify craving and has been translated into different languages. It is assumed that the PACS constitutes one factor, al...

Rationale Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is common in alcohol use disorder (AUD). Continuous performance tests (CPTs) allow to measure ADHD related deficits in a laboratory setting. Most studies on this topic focused on CPTs measuring inattention or impulsivity, disregarding hyperactivity as one of the core symptoms of ADHD. Metho...

A previous highly controlled pilot study revealed that body mass index (BMI) predicts outcome of in‐patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) in a sex‐specific manner. We here provide translational evidence from a daily clinical routine setting and investigated whether BMI and sex interact to predict 24‐month readmission risk in four naturalistic co...

Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a critical public health issue with sex-specific characteristics and the need for a better mechanistic understanding. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone can reduce alcohol intake, while estradiol leads to an increase. However, we lack knowledge about how progesterone relative to estradiol influence...

Das Versorgungssystem für Menschen mit alkoholbezogenen Störungen in Deutschland umfasst eine Vielzahl von differenzierten Angeboten, ist jedoch aufgrund historisch gewachsener Strukturen und den spezifischen Zuständigkeiten der Leistungsträger stark fragmentiert. Zu unterscheiden sind die speziell für Menschen mit Störungen durch Alkoholkonsum (Sd...

Background Males consume more alcohol than females, and alcohol use disorder (AUD) is more prevalent in males than females. However, females progress faster to AUD. Sex differences in neural alcohol cue reactivity were previously observed in young social drinkers, indicating a role of hypersensitivity to alcohol-related cues in very early stages of...

Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most common personality disorders among persons with substance use disorders (SUDs) and is characterized by severe clinical symptoms. The aim of this study was to investigate if the effect of dialectical behavior therapy for substance use disorders (DBT-S) inpatient treatment on psych...

BACKGROUND Alcohol use disorder has become a major global health problem. Therapy of this disease is still a great challenge. Recently, it has become increasingly evident that computer-based training is a valuable addition to the treatment of addictive disorders. OBJECTIVE This study aims to evaluate the web-based serious game “SALIENCE” as an add...

Background Multiple studies indicate that a lower plasma level of the acetylated form of the appetite-regulating hormone ghrelin and higher plasma levels of insulin lead to a reduction in subjective alcohol craving and a reduced mesolimbic cue reactivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) when being exposed to alcohol-associated stimul...

Introduction: Alcohol consumption in Germany is associated with considerable health and economic consequences. In addition to prevention, the early detection and differential treatment of those affected play an important role. The guideline "Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Alcohol Use Disorders" forms the basis of this care for people suffe...

Rationale Childhood maltreatment (CM) leads to detrimental mental health outcomes, such as substance use disorders (SUD). This study examined prevalence and severity of all five types of CM with respect to specific substances and sex in treatment-seeking individuals with SUD. The influences of type of CM and symptoms of depressiveness, anxiety, and...

The cover image is based on the Original Article Increased network centrality of the anterior insula in early abstinence from alcohol by Cecile Bordier et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/adb.13096.

Abnormal resting-state functional connectivity, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has been reported in alcohol use disorders (AUD), but findings are so far inconsistent. Here, we exploited recent developments in graph-theoretical analyses, enabling improved resolution and fine-grained representation of brain networks, to i...

Introduction: Preclinical studies have shown that calcium seems to be the active component of the anti-craving drug acamprosate (Ca2+ bis-acetyl-homotaurinate). Clinical effects in humans have also indicated an association between increased calcium plasma concentration due to acamprosate treatment and better outcome relating to time to relapse and...

Pharmacological treatment in alcohol use disorder suffers from modest effect sizes. Efforts have been undertaken to identify patient characteristics that help to select individuals that benefit from pharmacological treatment. Previous studies indicated that neural alcohol cue-reactivity (CR) might provide a marker that identifies patients, which be...

Zusammenfassung. Zielsetzung: Alkoholkonsum ist in Deutschland mit erheblichen gesundheitlichen und wirtschaftlichen Folgen assoziiert. Neben der Prävention spielen die Früherkennung und differentielle Behandlung von Betroffenen eine bedeutende Rolle. Die Leitlinie „Screening, Diagnose und Behandlung alkoholbezogener Störungen“ bildet die Grundlage...

Zusammenfassung Ziel Erfassung der Häufigkeit, mit der zentral in die Gesundheitsversorgung der Zielgruppe eingebundene Berufsgruppen auf problematischen Alkoholkonsum screenen. Die S3-Leitlinie „Screening, Diagnose und Behandlung alkoholbezogener Störungen“ empfiehlt „allen Patient/innen in allen Settings“ ein fragebogenbasiertes Screening anzubie...

Zusammenfassung Ziel der Studie Die Art und Häufigkeit durchgeführter Diagnostik, Kurzintervention und Behandlung bei PatientInnen mit bekanntem problematischen Alkoholkonsum und Alkoholkonsumstörungen durch Berufsgruppen der Gesundheitsversorgung soll erfasst werden. Diese Informationen dienen der Bedarfsabschätzung zur Entwicklung von Strategien...

Background and aims: Withdrawal is a serious and sometimes life-threatening event in alcohol-dependent individuals. It has been suggested that epigenetic processes may play a role in this context. This study aimed to identify genes and pathways involved in such processes which hint to relevant mechanisms underlying withdrawal. Design: Cross-sect...

Background The German Guideline on Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment of Alcohol Use Disorders aims to increase the uptake of evidence-based interventions for the early identification, diagnosis, prevention and treatment of alcohol-related disorders in relevant healthcare settings. To date, dissemination has not been accompanied by a guideline impl...

The clinical comorbidity of alcohol dependence (AD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) is well established, whereas genetic factors influencing co-occurrence remain unclear. A recent study using polygenic risk scores (PRS) calculated based on the first-wave Psychiatric Genomics Consortium MDD meta-analysis (PGC-MDD1) suggests a modest shared genet...

Individual differences in reward sensitivity along with weakened executive control are characteristic for alcohol use disorder (AUD). Emerging translational models of psychotherapy propose the integration of such neurobiological risk profiles to elucidate the mechanisms underlying behavior change in order to improve intervention efficacy. The prima...

Background Addicted Internet users present with higher rates of comorbidities, e.g., attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depressive, and anxiety disorders. In addition, deficits in self-concept-related characteristics were found in addicted Internet gamers and social network users. The aim of this study was to examine the links between...

Randomized trials of medications for alcohol dependence (AD) often report no differences between active medications. Few studies in AD have tested hypotheses regarding which medication will work best for which patients (ie, precision medicine). The PREDICT Study tested acamprosate and naltrexone versus placebo in 426 randomly assigned AD patients i...

Alcohol metabolizing enzymes, such as the alcohol dehydrogenases and the aldehyde dehydrogenases, regulate the levels of acetaldehyde in the blood and play an important role in the development and maintenance of alcohol addiction. Recent genome‐wide systematic searches found associations between a single nucleotide polymorphism (rs1789891, risk all...

Background: Alcohol relapse is often occurring to regulate negative affect during withdrawal. On the neurobiological level, alcoholism is associated with gray matter (GM) abnormalities in regions that regulate emotional experience such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, no study to our knowledge has investigated the neurobiological unpinn...

Background: Addicts to specific internet applications involving communication features showed increased social anxiety, emotional competence deficits and impaired prefrontal-related inhibitory control. The dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) likely plays an important role in cognitive control and negative affect (such as social exclusion, pain...

Background: While DSM-5 classified pathological gambling as an addictive disorder, there is debate as to whether ICD-11 should follow suit. The debate hinges on scientific evidence such as neurobiological findings, family history of psychiatric disorders, psychiatric comorbidity, and personality variables. Methods: In the "Baden-W?rttemberg Stud...

Background and aims Internet gaming addiction appears to be related to self-concept deficits and increased angular gyrus (AG)-related identification with one’s avatar. For increased social network use, a few existing studies suggest striatal-related positive social feedback as an underlying factor. However, whether an impaired self-concept and its...

Atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) receptors are highly expressed in the amygdala, caudate and hypothalamus. GATA4 gene encodes a transcription factor of ANP associated with the pathophysiology of alcohol dependence. We have previously demonstrated that the GATA4 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs13273672 revealed stronger alcohol-specific amygd...

Blockade of the μ-opioid receptor (MOR) by naltrexone reduces relapse risk in a subpopulation of alcohol-dependent patients. Previous positron-emission-tomography (PET) studies using the MOR ligand [(11)C]carfentanil have found increased MOR availability in abstinent alcoholics, which may reflect either increased MOR expression or lower endogenous...

Background: Common variants in the gene GATA binding protein 4 (GATA4) show association with alcohol dependence (AD). The aim of this study was to identify rare variants in GATA4 in order to elucidate the role of this gene in AD susceptibility. Identification of rare variants may provide a more complete picture of the allelic architecture at this...

Ziel der Studie: Disulfiram ist zur Senkung der Rückfallrate bei Alkoholabhängigen nur wirksam, wenn es mit mehrmals wöchentlichen Kontakten verknüpft ist. Es stellt sich daher die Frage, ob eine intensivierte ambulante Behandlung auch ohne Disulfiram wirkt, bzw. ob es bestimmte Patientengruppen gibt, die von einer solchen Therapie profitieren. Met...

Introduction The development and maintenance of an alcohol addiction is a complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors. Genetic effects seem to contribute substantially to the risk of developing an addiction, but also to its course and patients’ responses to different treatments. Recent studies identified associations between polym...

Alcoholism is one of the most prevalent neuropsychiatric diseases, having an enormous health and socioeconomic impact. Along with a few other medications, acamprosate (Campral—calcium-bis (N-acetylhomotaurinate)) is clinically used in many countries for relapse prevention. Although there is accumulated evidence suggesting that acamprosate interfere...

Einleitung: Die Einnahme von Disulfiram im Rahmen von haufigen psychotherapeutischen Kurzkontakten (2 – 3x/Woche) hat einen wichtigen Stellenwert in der ambulanten Behandlung Alkoholabhangiger. Eine Medikation mit Disulfiram ohne diese intensivierte Behandlung ist jedoch wirkungslos. Es stellt sich daher die Frage, ob eine intensivierte ambulante B...

The aim of the current study was to determine genotype effects of four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the genes of the N-Methyl-d-aspartate receptor (GRIN1, GRIN2A, GRIN2C) and kainate receptor (GRIK1), which have been previously associated with alcoholism, on behavior, neural cue-reactivity and drinking outcome. Eighty-six abstinent alc...

Mesocorticolimbic reactivity to alcohol-associated cues has been shown to be associated with relapse to renewed drinking and to be decreased by cue-exposure-based extinction training (CET). Evidence from preclinical studies suggests that the extinction of conditioned alcohol-seeking behavior might be facilitated by drugs increasing N-methyl-D-aspar...

The endogenous opioid system is involved in the pathophysiology of alcohol-use disorders. Genetic variants of the opioid system alter neural and behavioral responses to alcohol. In particular, a single nucleotide polymorphism rs1799971 (A118G) in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is suggested to modulate alcohol-related phenotypes and neural resp...

Aggregation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in regions-of-interest (ROI) is required for complex statistical analyses not implemented in standard fMRI software. Different data-aggregation methods assess various aspects of neural activation, including spatial extent and intensity. New method: In this study, conducted within the...

Previous research on alcohol dependent patients has shown that variations in eyeblink startle response can be used as an indicator of their emotional responses to alcohol-related stimuli. Postulating that reactions on substance associated stimuli are controlled by either a negative or a positive affective processing system, we expect that abstinent...

Background: Effect sizes of pharmacotherapy in alcoholism are modest. They might improve if subjects could be divided into more homogeneous subgroups and would then be treated targeted to their neurobiological profile. In such an effort, we tested neural cue reactivity as a potential predictor of treatment response to naltrexone. Alcohol-associate...

Background: The goal of the current study was to use tree-based methods (Zhang and Singer, 2010, Recursive Partitioning and Applications, 2nd ed. Springer, New York) to identify predictors of abstinence from heavy drinking in COMBINE (Anton et al. JAMA 2006; 295:2003), the largest study of pharmacotherapy for alcoholism in the United States to dat...

Goal of the presented study is to evaluate whether alcohol-dependent patients given additional individual psychotherapy after a heavy relapse during pharmacotherapy remain abstinent for longer than those who continue with pharmacotherapy alone. In a randomized, multicenter study, 109 alcohol-dependent patients who had suffered a heavy relapse eithe...

The results of placebo-controlled trials (RCTs) with acamprosate or naltrexone vary substantially. Those differences have been attributed to differing patient characteristics, recruitment strategies, treatment settings and remuneration systems. We tested these assumptions by comparing a new double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial conducte...

Einleitung: Auch in hoherem Lebensalter spielen Substanzmissbrauch und Substanzabhangigkeit eine bedeutende Rolle. Studien zeigen, dass etwa 27% der Manner und 8% der Frauen dieser Altersgruppe betroffen sind. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei Alkohol- und Medikamentenmissbrauch. Die damit einhergehenden Folgeerkrankungen betreffen eine grose Bevolkerung...

The aims of this study were to determine the frequency of dual pathology and suicide risks in substance-using prisoners and to analyze the factors associated with their development. The sample consisted of 143 prisoners (95.8% male) confined in the prison of Villabona (Asturias, Spain). Descriptive and logistic regression analyses were used. Thirty...