Salvatore Campanella

Université Libre de Bruxelles | ULB

Alcohol dependence is currently one of the most serious public health problems. Indeed, 3-8% of all deaths worldwide are attributable to effects of alcohol consumption. Although the first step in alcohol dependence treatment is straightforward, the main problem for clinicians lies with the prevention of relapse, as 40-70% of patients who only under...

There is growing interest in non-invasive brain stimulation as a novel treatment option for substance use disorders (SUDs). Recent momentum stems from a foundation of preclinical neuroscience research demonstrating causal and associative links between neural circuit activity and drug consuming behavior, as well as recent FDA-approval of non-invasiv...

Introduction The global COVID-19 pandemic has affected the economy, daily life, and mental/physical health. The latter includes the use of electroencephalography (EEG) in clinical practice and research. We report a survey of the impact of COVID-19 on the use of clinical EEG in practice and research in several countries, and the recommendations of a...

Relapse prevention remains a major challenge in psychiatry, thus indicating that the established treatment methods combining psychotherapy with neuropharmacological interventions are not entirely effective. In recent years, several intervention strategies have been devised that are aimed at improving psychiatric treatment by providing a complementa...

Background A significant number of individuals with alcohol use disorder remain unresponsive to currently available treatments, which calls for the development of new alternatives. In parallel, psilocybin-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder has recently yielded promising preliminary results. Building on extant findings, the proposed study is...

Objective. Neurophysiological tools remain indispensable instruments in the assessment of psychiatric disorders. These techniques are widely available, inexpensive and well tolerated, providing access to the assessment of brain functional alterations. In the clinical psychiatric context, electrophysiological techniques are required to provide impor...

Background: A significant number of individuals with alcohol use disorder remain unresponsive to currently available treatments, which calls for the development of new alternatives. In parallel, psilocybin-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder has recently yielded promising preliminary results. Building on extant findings, the proposed study is...

(1) Background: Inhibitory and rewarding processes that mediate attentional biases to addiction-related cues may slightly differ between patients suffering from alcohol use (AUD) or gambling (GD) disorder. (2) Methods: 23 AUD inpatients, 19 GD patients, and 22 healthy controls performed four separate Go/NoGo tasks, in, respectively, an alcohol, gam...

Objective: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with important cognitive impairments. These deficits play a significant role in the maintenance of consumption, despite the negative effect that it has on the daily life of alcohol addicts. The main objective of this case report is to illustrate how cognitive event-related potentials (ERPs) can be...

Background and aims: Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for develop...

According to the Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) framework, cognitive control can be divided into two strategies: proactive cognitive control, which relies mainly on the active maintenance of contextual information relevant to the ongoing task; and reactive cognitive control, which is a form of transient control triggered by an external cue. Altho...

Background and Aims Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for developin...

Recent global data indicates a worldwide increase in polydrug use associated with a shift from recreational to productive habits of consumption. Such non-responsible abuse of substances (alcohol, cocaine, heroin, etc.) is likely to lead to addictive disorders that are characterized by various neuropsychopharmacological effects. A main cognitive fun...

Comme le traitement des patients alcoolo-dépendants reste à ce jour largement problématique, nous nous basons sur le modèle (dual) neurocognitif des addictions. Dès lors, remédiation cognitive et neuromodulation par stimulation transcrâ-nienne sont proposées dans cette étude que nous avons menée. Les résultats sont encourageants et nécessitent des...

Background: Approximately half of all people with alcohol use disorder (AUD) relapse into alcohol reuse in the next few weeks after a withdrawal treatment. Brain stimulation and cognitive training represent recent forms of complementary interventions in the context of AUD. Objective: To evaluate the clinical efficacy of five sessions of 2 mA bilat...

A crucial point in the recovery of substance use disorders (SUDs) is related to the difficulty for clinicians to detect and quantify the impact of psychiatric comorbidity on individual patients. The frequent co-occurrence of SUD with other psychiatric syndromes (e.g. mood, anxiety, thought disorder) raises important questions about the potential me...

Addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder. Despite pharmacological and psychological interventions during rehabilitation, a majority of patients still relapse. In this seventh chapter, we present neuromodulation techniques as a complementary intervention for addiction. Firstly, while deep brain stimulation (DBS) has shown promising results, its cos...

Recent advances in social neuroscience have highlighted the critical role of the cerebellum in social cognition, and especially the posterior cerebellum. Studies have supported the view that the posterior cerebellum builds internal action models of our social interactions to predict how other people’s actions will be executed and what our most like...

Background Approximately half the people with alcohol use disorder (AUD) relapse into alcohol reuse in the few weeks following withdrawal treatment. Brain stimulation and cognitive training represent recent forms of complementary interventions in the context of AUD. Objective To evaluate the clinical efficacy of transcranial direct current stimula...

- Multiple sessions of tDCS targeting the DLPFC reduced the rate of early relapse in detoxified patients with alcohol-use disorder. - When tDCS is combined with alcohol cue inhibitory control training, the abstinence rate at two weeks after discharge was the highest. - The resilient effects of the combined procedure on abstinence did not persist...

Background Spontaneous motor responses of approach and avoidance toward stimuli are important in characterizing psychopathological conditions, including alcohol use disorder (AUD). However, divergent results have been reported, possibly due to confounded parameters (e.g., using a symbolic vs. a sensorimotor task, implementation of approach–avoidanc...

Objective: We investigated whether the mid-term impact (1 week posttraining) of a "combined cognitive rehabilitation (CRP)/transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) program" on the performance of a Go/No-go task was enhanced compared with isolated CRP and whether it varied according to the stimulation site (right inferior frontal gyrus [rIFG]...

Introduction Impaired metacognition and impulsivity are critical factors in pathological gambling behavior subsistence. This study aims at jointly exploring metacognitive skills and impulsivity levels in subgroups of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients with different gambling status. Method 48 PD participants were divided into three subgroups: PD Ga...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has broadly disrupted biomedical treatment and research including non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS). Moreover, the rapid onset of societal disruption and evolving regulatory restrictions may not have allowed for systematic planning of how clinical and research work may continue throughout the pandemic or be rest...

Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) has a disconcertingly high relapse rate (70 to 80% within a year following withdrawal). Preventing relapse or minimizing its extent is hence a challenging goal for long-term successful management of AUD. New perspectives that rely on diverse neuromodulation tools have been developed in this regard as care supports. This p...

Although there is general consensus that altered brain structure and function underpins addictive disorders, clinicians working in addiction treatment rarely incorporate neuroscience-informed approaches into their practice. We recently launched the Neuroscience Interest Group within the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM-NIG) to prom...

Cognitive training results in significant, albeit modest, improvements in specific cognitive functions across a range of mental illnesses. Inhibitory control, defined as the ability to stop the execution of an automatic reaction or a planned motor behavior, is known to be particularly important for the regulation of health behaviors, including addi...

Introduction Chez des participants sains, des études ont permis de démontrer une modification du comportement postural en réponses à des stimulations visuelles émotionnelles. Actuellement, les recherches ont donné des résultats mitigés sur la prédiction de la rechute alcoolique et les tendances d’approche envers l’alcool. Notre objectif est de voir...

Objective: Finding new tools for conventional management of alcohol disorders is a challenge for psychiatrists. Brain indications related to cognitive functioning could represent such an add-on tool. Methods: Forty alcohol-dependent inpatients undertook two cognitive event-related potential (ERP) tasks at the beginning and at the end of a 4-week...

Background: This pilot study explores a therapeutic setting combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for patients with drug-resistant depression. tDCS has shown efficacy for depression treatment and improvement could be maintained with the combination with mindfulness, which has shown d...

Addiction behaviors are characterized by conditioned responses responsible for craving and automatic actions as well as disturbances within the supervisory network, one of the key elements of which is the inhibition of prepotent response. Interventions such as brain stimulation and cognitive training targeting this imbalanced system can potentially...

Many studies have reported that heavy substance use is associated with impaired response inhibition. Studies typically focused on associations with a single substance, while polysubstance use is common. Further, most studies compared heavy users with light/non-users, though substance use occurs along a continuum. The current mega-analysis accounted...

Despite equated behavioral performance levels, hazardous drinkers generally exhibited increased neural activity while performing simple cognitive tasks compared to light drinkers. Here, 49 participants (25 hazardous and 24 light drinkers) participated in an event-related potentials (ERPs) study while performing an n-back working memory task. In the...

Response inhibition is a key component regarding substance use as it allows subjects to stop drug-seeking and drug-consummation behaviors and is often specifically altered in addiction. If the specific alteration of response inhibition in addiction has been extensively studied, little has been developed regarding the neural correlates of response i...

Emotional crossmodal integration (i.e., multisensorial decoding of emotions) is a crucial process that ensures adaptive social behaviors and responses to the environment. Recent evidence suggests that in binge drinking—an excessive alcohol consumption pattern associated with psychological and cerebral deficits—crossmodal integration is preserved at...

Inhibitory control, a process deeply studied in laboratory settings, refers to the ability to inhibit an action once it has been initiated. A common way to process data in such tasks is to take the mean response time (RT) and error rate per participant. However, such an analysis ignores the strong dependency between spontaneous RT variations and er...

The ability to suppress responses that are inappropriate, as well as the mechanisms monitoring the accuracy of actions in order to compensate for errors, is central to human behavior. Neural alterations that prevent stopping an inaccurate response, combined with a decreased ability of error monitoring, are considered to be prominent features of alc...

The present study investigates a new neurocognitive method aimed at strenghtening two cognitive skills, inhibition and attention, that were found to play a key role in triggering relapse in ”high-risk” populations, such as populations with addictions.

Conditional reasoning (if p then q) is used very frequently in everyday situations. Conditional reasoning is impaired in brain-lesion patients, psychopathy, alcoholism, and polydrug dependence. Many neurocognitive deficits have also been described in schizophrenia. We assessed conditional reasoning in 25 patients with schizophrenia, 25 depressive p...

Objective: Cognitive impairment is a major component in addiction. However, research has been inconclusive as to whether this is also the case for smokers. The present study aims at providing electrophysiological clue for altered inhibitory control in smokers and at investigating whether reduced inhibition was more pronounced during exposure to a...

Background and aims Internet addiction (IA) was recently defined as a disorder tagging both the impulse control and the reward systems. Specifically, inhibitory deficits and reward bias were considered highly relevant in IA. This research aims to examine the electrophysiological correlates and autonomic activity [skin conductance response (SCR) and...

A common feature of many psychopathological states (going from anxiety, depression to schizophrenia, or addictive states) is to be associated with large-scale cognitive impairments, which have a clear impact on the onset and maintenance of clinical symptoms (Menon, 2011). Therefore, studies have shown that the training and rehabilitation of cogniti...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) bimodal oddball task has disclosed increased sensitivity to show P300 modulations to subclinical symptoms. Even if the utility of such a procedure has still to be confirmed at a clinical level, gathering normative values of this new oddball variant may be of the greatest interest. We specifically addressed the challe...

Etiologically and symptomatically, depression is a profoundly heterogeneous disorder. Symptoms may be classified as either emotional or cognitive. Fear, seeking and panic/grief primary emotional circuits are involved at variable intensities. Cognitive symptoms are mostly associated with executive functions' problems. Different symptoms may be linke...

Major depression is a serious disorder of impaired emotion regulation. Emotion hyperactivity leads to excessive negative ruminations that daily hijack the patient’s mental life, impacting their mood. Evidence from past researches suggest that depressive patients present several cognitive impairments in attention and working memory, leading to a mor...

Objective: We found previously that use of a bimodal oddball design with synchronized pairs of audio-visual stimuli increased the sensitivity of the P300 wave to detect subclinical anxiety-depression in otherwise healthy subjects. Here, we wished to determine whether these P300 modulations would also be encountered when a clinical population compr...

Inhibitory control refers to the ability to inhibit an action once it has been initiated. Impaired inhibitory control plays a key role in triggering relapse in some pathological states, such as addictions. Therefore, a major challenge of current research is to establish new methods to strengthen inhibitory control in these “high-risk” populations....

Alcohol-dependent patients have difficulty recognizing social cues such as emotional facial expressions, prosody, and postures. However, most researchers describing these difficulties rely on labeling tasks. It therefore remains difficult to disentangle genuine emotion-decoding problems from emotion-labeling impairments. In the present study, 35 re...

Currently, relapse prevention remains the main challenge in addiction medicine, indicating that the established treatment methods combining psychotherapy with neuropharmacological interventions are not entirely effective. Therefore, there is a push to develop alternatives to psychotherapy- and medication-based approaches to addiction treatment. Two...

The prevention of relapse is a main challenge to face with in alcohol dependence. Two major cognitive factors can partially account for alcoholics' inability to remain abstinent: attentional biases directed towards alcohol-related stimuli that increase the urge to drink, and impaired response inhibition towards these cues that makes it more difficu...

We previously found that using a bimodal oddball design with synchronized pairs of audio-visual stimuli increased the sensitivity of the P300 wave to subclinical differences in depression. We wondered: (1) whether these P300 modulations were due to facilitated discrimination of deviant vs. frequent stimuli and (2) whether congruency of the stimuli...

Higuchi et al. (2014) published a paper comparing healthy controls, schizophrenic patients and subjects with at-risk mental state (ARMS) during an event-related potential (ERP) auditory oddball task. Results showed that ARMS subjects who transitioned to schizophrenia (Converters) disclosed diminished duration mismatch negativity amplitudes (dMMN) a...

Studies that have carried out experimental evaluation of emotional skills in alcohol-dependence have, up to now, been mainly focused on the exploration of emotional facial expressions (EFE) decoding. In the present paper, we provide some complements to the recent systematic literature review published by Donadon and de Lima Osório on this crucial t...

Objectives: The present research explored the effect of reward sensitivity bias and metacognitive deficits on substance use disorder (SUD) in the decision-making process. Methods: The behavioral activation system (BAS) was used as a predictive marker of dysfunctional behavior during the Iowa gambling task (IGT). We also tried to relate this moti...

Background: The continuation of binge drinking is associated with the development of neurocognitive brain abnormalities similar to those observed in patients with alcohol dependence. Alcohol cue reactivity constitutes a risk marker for alcohol dependence. Through event-related potentials (ERPs), we aimed to examine its potential presence as well a...

Background Alcohol dependence is a chronic relapsing disease. The impairment of response inhibition and alcohol-cue reactivity are the main cognitive mechanisms that trigger relapse. Despite the interaction suggested between the two processes, they have long been investigated as two different lines of research. The present study aimed to investigat...

Face-voice integration has been extensively explored among healthy participants during the last decades. Nevertheless, while binding alterations constitute a core feature of many psychiatric diseases and have been thoroughly investigated in schizophrenia and autism, these crossmodal processes have been little explored in other psychiatric populatio...

La littérature comportementale, investiguant les processus émotionnels dans les populations dépressives (i.e., dépression uni- et bipolaire), nous apprend que, comparé à des contrôles sains, les sujets dépressifs présentent des troubles du traitement émotionnel, traduits par une moins bonne performance et/ou des latences de réponse retardées. Le dé...

Introduction: Previous studies have highlighted the advantage of using audio–visual oddball tasks (instead of unimodal ones) in order to electrophysiologically index subclinical behavioral differences. Since alexithymia is highly prevalent in the general population, we investigated whether the use of various bimodal tasks could elicit emotional eff...

Early adolescence is a key developmental period for the initiation of alcohol use, and consumption among adolescents is characterized by drinking in high quantities. At the same time, adolescence is characterized by rapid biological transformations including dramatic changes in the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex and the mesocorticolim...

Aims: While the relationship between chronic exposure to alcohol and neurobiological damage is well established, deleterious brain effects of binge drinking in youths have only recently been studied. Methods: Narrative review of studies of brain disturbances associated with binge drinking as assessed by neuroimaging (EEG and IRMf techniques in part...

While the relationship between chronic exposure to alcohol and neurobiological damage is well established, deleterious brain effects of binge drinking in youths have only recently been studied. Narrative review of studies of brain disturbances associated with binge drinking as assessed by neuroimaging (EEG and IRMf techniques in particular) in adol...

The relapse rate for many psychiatric disorders is staggeringly high, indicating that treatment methods combining psychotherapy with neuropharmacological interventions are not entirely effective. Therefore, in psychiatry, there is a current push to develop alternatives to psychotherapy and medication-based approaches. Cognitive deficits have gained...

Mechanisms that mediate the transition from occasional, controlled, drug use to the impaired control that characterizes severe dependence are still a matter of investigation. The etiology of substance use disorders (SUDs) is complex, and in this context of complexity, the concept of "endophenotype," has gained extensive popularity in recent years....