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TRR 265:  Losing and Regaining Control over Drug Intake: From Trajectories to Mechanisms to Interventions

Subject Area Medicine
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term since 2019
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402170461
 
One of the major risk factors for global disability and death is alcohol, tobacco and illicit drug use. Drug use can become compulsive but we still have little understanding of the modulating factors and mechanisms involved in losing and regaining control over drug intake. The main goals of TRR 265 are (i) to study modifying factors (e.g. age, gender, childhood adversity) that longitudinally modulate the trajectories of losing and regaining control over drug consumption in real-life conditions, (ii) to study underlying behavioral, cognitive and molecular mechanisms of disease trajectories, and (iii) to provide non-invasive mechanism-based interventions. The innovative character of our CRC is the focus on real-life conditions. So far, addiction research is mainly conducted in clinical settings; however, the transfer of this knowledge to the real-world is often misleading. The real-world perspective that we are now focusing on became only recently possible with technical advancements in mHealth tools, computational modelling, the handling of big data, and AI. This requires the close interaction of addiction researchers with various disciplines resulting in a highly inter-disciplinary team of 51 principal investigators working on 22 research projects and two infrastructure projects on data management (INF) and mHealth infrastructure for real-life assessments. In the first funding period (FP), we built a functional and robust infrastructure and common “inter-disciplinary language” across three sites – Berlin, Dresden, and Mannheim. To date, we have primarily focused on alcohol addiction, as this produces in Germany the largest health and socioeconomic burden of all drugs of abuse. On all dissemination levels, ranging from collaborative efforts within the CRC to inter-disciplinary publication output and media outreach to more than 115 million people we have already realized added value that is clearly more than simply the sum of the 24 stand-alone projects. What will we do in the 2nd FP? We will shift from the real-life description of disease trajectories to the underlying mechanisms and the hereof-derived mechanism-based interventions. We will also generalize our findings from alcohol to other drugs of abuse, especially cannabis, in order to answer the questions: do all addictions share the same phenomenon and mechanisms in real-life conditions in terms of disease trajectories, triggers and modifying factors? Hence, how distinct are the different addictions, and what are the shared pathological phenomena? Can treatments be generalized to all addictions or does it require specific interventions for each drug of abuse? Answering these fundamental questions in real-life conditions will have major implications for diagnosis, precision medicine, comorbidities, addiction theories, and socio-political decisions such as taxation and legalization. The last point in particular is very relevant in relation to the forthcoming legalization of cannabis in Germany
DFG Programme CRC/Transregios

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Spokespersons Professor Dr. Andreas Heinz, until 12/2022; Professor Dr. Rainer Spanagel, since 1/2023
 
 

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