Caryn E Lerman

..The coordinated effort of multidisciplinary research teams will help reveal the circumstances under which we can translate genetic insights into clinical practice in the hope of reducing the burden of smoking in society...

..Future studies of the role of inattention symptoms in response to smoking treatment are warranted...

..This study evaluated the utility of the 3-HC/cotinine ratio as a predictor of the efficacy of nicotine replacement therapy as an aid for smoking cessation...

..Smokers who carry the OPRM1 Asp40 variant are likely to have a favorable response to TN and may benefit from extended therapy with the 21 mg dose...

..Study findings require confirmation in additional larger samples before they are applied in practice...

..Despite the high prevalence and public health significance of weight gain following smoking cessation, little is known about the underlying bio-behavioral mechanisms or effective therapies...

..However, additional trials including larger and more diverse populations are needed before such data can be translated to practice to reduce smoking prevalence and tobacco-related disease...

..These discoveries could someday help practitioners to individualize the type, dosage, and duration of tobacco dependence treatment based on genotype, and maximize the efficacy...

..These results provide the first evidence from a prospective clinical trial that genes that alter dopamine function may influence smoking cessation and relapse during the treatment phase...

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..Laboratory-based paradigms may be useful to identify other mediators of bupropion's effects, thereby pointing to mechanisms of effect that can be bolstered in future treatment studies...

..Such research has the potential to improve treatment outcome, thereby reducing morbidity and mortality from smoking-related disease...

..Such research could ultimately enable practitioners to select the optimal type and dose of medication for individual smokers...

..This article provides an overview of currently available data from genetics research on smoking behavior and discusses study design issues to be addressed to make progress in this line of research...

..RMs of nicotine are candidates for extended transdermal nicotine therapy, whereas an alternative therapeutic approach may be needed for those with normal rates of nicotine metabolism...

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..These results warrant replication but provide the first evidence for genetic associations with the acute increase in smoking reward and reinforcement owing to negative mood...

..This Issue Brief reviews ongoing work at Penn's Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center (TTURC) to unravel the genetic factors that might affect smoking cessation and to develop more effective treatment strategies...

..Additional research in this area would also be valuable to evaluate strategies to promote attendance in these high-risk groups...

..They also suggest that parental smoking may not increase risk of nicotine dependence in offspring by altering initial nicotine sensitivity, and that cross-tolerance between other drugs and nicotine may not be robust in humans...

..Additional sequencing and characterization of ChAT may reveal functional variants that contribute to nicotine dependence and smoking cessation...

..In rodents and humans, cognitive deficits can be reversed by treatment with the alpha4beta2 nicotinic receptor partial agonist varenicline. This neuroimaging study examined the neural mechanisms that underlie these effects...

..These results suggest that bupropion treatment may reduce the gender disparity in prolonged abstinence rates among lighter smokers...

..001). These data suggest that anger may be an important withdrawal symptom that influences liability to relapse. Future studies are needed to evaluate treatment strategies that effectively help smokers reduce and manage post-quit anger...

..Varenicline, a partial agonist at the alpha4beta2 nAChRs, is a new, efficacious medication for nicotine dependence. Its effects on the affective and cognitive dimensions of nicotine withdrawal have yet to be well characterized...

..CONCLUSIONS: Ethnicity, weight, and level of nicotine dependence may help identify smokers who have greater or lesser abstinence rates with either transdermal or nasal spray nicotine...

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..We hypothesized that faster NMR would be associated with greater cigarette puff volume and higher levels of total 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanol (NNAL), a carcinogen biomarker...

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..patch differentially affected cardiovascular responses and perhaps craving but did not influence withdrawal, subjective ratings, and smoking reinforcement...

..These complementary studies send a cautionary signal about the ability of these new cigarettes to reduce the harmful effects of smoking...

..Larger-scale investigations that incorporate pathway-based or genome-wide analysis, as well as intermediate measures of nicotine dependence (i.e. 'endophenotypes'), may be necessary to capture the complexity of pharmacogenetic effects...

..Future research on individual differences in nicotine boost is warranted to clarify the role of psychological, physiological, and cigarette-related determinants...

..Further cross-species analysis will allow us to investigate mechanisms and adaptations present in humans carrying this SNP...

..Nicotine alters auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in rodents and humans and is an effective treatment for smoking cessation. Less is known about the effects of the partial nicotine agonist varenicline on ERPs...

..Greater attention to the unique needs of female smokers may allow healthcare providers to optimize delivery of pharmacotherapy and behavioral counseling to aid their female patients to quit smoking...

..38, t[355]=-3.09, p<.05). These data support the value of the 3-HC/cotinine ratio as a biomarker to predict success with transdermal nicotine for smoking cessation...

..These data suggest that increased activation in the brain's visuospatial and reward circuitry underlies abstinence-induced cravings to smoke, and thereby, may be important in relapse...

..Enhanced understanding of these dimensions of nicotine dependence may help to advance progress toward lowering the prevalence rate of tobacco use in the U.S. and lowering the rate of tobacco-related morbidity and mortality...

..In a panel of 43 randomly selected control SNPs, none is significant by either the Bayesian or the corrected frequentist test...

..Modafinil (Provigil), a wakefulness medication shown to have efficacy for the treatment of cocaine addiction, was tested as a novel therapy for nicotine dependence in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial...

..The study was conducted within a regulatory framework that required its pharmacological safety to be assessed simultaneously...

..The purpose of this review is to provide an outline of the work in neuroimaging, genetics, and nicotine dependence, and to explore the potential for increased integration of these approaches to improve nicotine dependence treatment...

..Argument strength indicates smoker's judgments of perceived strength and persuasiveness of the arguments extracted from the PSAs...

..Counter-advertising messages should consider individual differences in novelty-seeking, because novelty-seekers may be most receptive to tobacco industry promotional campaigns...

..This study determined whether healthy current smokers and nonsmokers exhibit differences in dopamine transporter (DAT) binding measured by Tc-99m TRODAT SPECT...

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..Further research disentangling lapse and recovery events from summary abstinence measures is needed to help us develop interventions that take advantage of bupropion at its best and that compensate where it is weak...

..There is considerable hope that genetic susceptibility testing will motivate behavior that can prevent or reduce the risk of complex conditions such as obesity. This study examined potential behavioral consequences of such testing...

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..To determine if the lower activity Met allele of COMT was associated with smoking cessation in women, we used two independent studies: a population-based case--control study and a nicotine replacement clinical trial...

..Naltrexone and bupropion have been shown to alter ad lib smoking behavior; however, medication effects on nicotine reward in a cigarette choice paradigm have yet to be investigated...

..The goal of the present study was to identify specific genetic associations with smoking progression in adolescents and to determine whether these genetic effects on smoking practices are potentiated by depression symptoms...

..These findings indicate that, although TN may enhance positive affect for smokers in treatment compared with NS, only changes in negative affect predict treatment outcome...

..001). These results suggest that interventions designed to address perceptions of stress related to medical decision-making and familial concerns may need to be targeted to BRCA1/2 mutation carriers and individuals who are highly anxious...

..A secondary objective was to determine the relationship of smoking topography to carbon monoxide (CO) exposure...

..The objective of this study was to determine whether modest financial incentives increase the rate of smoking cessation program enrollment, completion, and quit rates in a outpatient clinical setting...

..This study investigated colonoscopy practices following genetic testing for HNPCC mutations...

..The results from this study also suggest a behavioral mechanism that may account for reduced cancer risk in slow metabolizers...

..We investigated variants in the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene in a smoking cessation trial of bupropion...

..While preliminary, these results suggest a neural mechanism through which these genetic variants may be linked with nicotine dependence, and provide further support for increased biological vulnerability in these subgroups of smokers...

..Although marketed as a PREP, increases in CO boost suggest this product can potentially be a harm-increasing product...

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..Age was associated with reduced peak HRF in left frontal region. Thus, indices of the HRF can be used to better understand the relationship between hemodynamic changes and performance and can be sensitive to individual differences...

..In schizophrenia, reduced modulation of OFC/VLPFC by context coupled with reduced behavioural efficiency suggests impaired ventral prefrontal control mechanisms that optimize affective appraisal...

..These results suggest that some effects of olanzapine may impact both symptoms and cognitive performance...

..The authors sought to identify the functional neuroanatomy of the brain response to visual heroin-related stimuli in methadone maintenance patients...

..We investigated whether this impairment is aggravated by difficulties relating the observed facial expression to contextual information, as is often provided by emotionally valenced crossmodal stimulation...

..The results suggest that reduced temporal-DLPFC connectivity in schizophrenia could underlie encoding deficits, and increased temporal-VLPFC connectivity may represent an ineffective compensatory effort...

..These results indicate the presence of a central network with modality-specific and -unspecific components modulating emotional face recognition...

..The authors used an affective face recognition paradigm to examine possible interactions between cognitive and affective neural systems in schizophrenia...

..A model for the average expression of specific emotions was also constructed using the RVD maps. This method can be applied in basic and clinical investigations of facial affect and its neural substrates...

..Activation in these areas was associated with worse positive and negative symptoms, but did not correlate with performance, suggesting inefficient rather than compensatory activation...

..Patients with schizophrenia improve episodic memory accuracy when given organizational strategies through levels-of-processing paradigms. This study tested if improvement is accompanied by normalized frontotemporal function...

..Cerebral activity underlying abnormal attention can be examined with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging...

..Earlier studies described gaze discrimination impairment in schizophrenia. The purpose of this study was to compare gaze discrimination abilities and associated brain activation in persons with stable schizophrenia and matched controls...

..Results indicate that the fusiform cortex and amygdala respond differentially in the four target conditions (happy, sad, angry and fearful) along the dimension of threat-relatedness...

..The results indicate that a network of frontolimbic regions may provide emotional bias signals during facial recognition...

..Deficits in emotion processing are prominent in schizophrenia, and flat affect is resistant to treatment and portends poor outcome. Investigation of the underlying neural circuitry can elucidate affective dysfunction...

..Such abnormal integration may disrupt the evaluation of threat within fronto-cortical regions...

..The long-term objective of this research is to discover and develop new pharmacogenetic treatment models that can be readily translated to the clinical setting to individualize pharmacotherapy and maximize effectiveness. ..

..PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This study will improve our understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie abstinence-induced cognitive deficits which promote smoking relapse. ..

..The long-term objective is to provide information necessary to match smoking cessation treatments to individuals, based on their genetic predispositions. ..

..Finally, we will use regressive models to identify key variables and causal processes associated with progress through stages of smoking behavior change and cessation...

..Finally, we will use regressive models to identify key variables and causal processes associated with progress through stages of smoking behavior change and cessation. ..

..The novel web-based computerized cognitive training intervention is "portable" and can be easily translated to clinical practice for the treatment for nicotine dependence. ..