While these two fMRI studies examining alcohol priming in the context of cue-reactivity offer some insights, they each have limitations. Specifically, Bragulat et al. (2008) used olfactory cues in a small sample of hazardous drinkers and had limited power to assess magnitude differences across alcohol priming and saline control conditions with a sample size of just seven subjects included in the analysis (9). Filbey et al. (2008) focused on alcohol priming as a tool for probing genetic effects of cue-reactivity in specific brain regions, thus analyses did not evaluate the absolute difference in activation across ROIs during pre- and post-alcohol priming conditions (10). Given the importance of alcohol priming in the cue-reactivity literature and the relative paucity of studies interrogating the role of alcohol priming in neural responses during cue-reactivity, the present study used a within-subjects design to test whether BOLD signal response to alcohol taste cues (11) would change following a priming dose of alcohol (target BrAC=0.03g/dl) in a sample of non-treatment seeking alcohol dependent individuals. While the behavioral pharmacology literature suggests that alcohol priming would increase the desire
