Chunk #55 — Locomotor Activating, Autonomic and Central Electrophysiological Responses to Alcohol Predictive of Risk — Heart rate and autonomic stimulation
Regarding craving and “cue-reactivity,” contextual cues associated with drug and alcohol self- administration and “mental representation of these cues” can elicit heart rate/autonomic arousal (cue-reactivity) in humans (Childress et al. 1993;O’Brien et al. 1992;Rajan et al. 1998). “Cue-reactivity” describes an organism’s (primarily clinical populations) reactivity, often manifested as “craving” and generally autonomic in nature, to stimuli associated with drug or alcohol consumption [c.f. (Newlin 1992;Rohsenow et al. 1990;Vogel-Sprott 1995)]. Additionally, alcoholics display greater autonomic arousal than controls in the presence of these cues (Drummond et al. 1990). In another study, when subjects were told that a beverage contained alcohol, alcoholics displayed increases in heart rate and their level of dependence determined the duration of this heart rate increase (Stormark et al. 1998). However, with an alcohol placebo procedure, decreases in heart rate have also been reported [c.f. (Newlin 1985)]. In addition, Native Americans at high risk for alcoholism were not found to have increases in heart rate following an alcohol challenge (Garcia-Andrade et al. 1997) and, not unexpectedly, increased heart rate following an alcohol challenge was found to be highly
