Despite these caveats, the current research is the first to establish that stress has its pernicious impact on drinking during treatment by its positive association with increasing craving, that in turn, increases the risk of next day alcohol intake in AUD individuals’ initiation of treatment and early recovery across two separate samples. These findings validate previous laboratory studies that show acute personalized stress provocation increases craving and such increases in stress-induced craving prospectively predict relapse (Sinha et al., 2011a, 2006). Furthermore, the findings underscore the importance of targeting craving specific to stressful experiences during AUD treatment. Since there are limited treatments that directly target stress-evoked craving, development, and testing of novel interventions that specifically address the stress-induced craving state may serve to enhance alcohol use treatment outcomes.
