Application of electroencephalogram and other neurophysiological measures in assessment of cue-reactivity in individuals with substance use disorder

The chapter focuses on attentional biases, drug and stress cue-reactivity in individuals with substance use disorders (SUD) including alcoholism. SUD include disorders related to the taking of a drug of abuse and represent one of the most common psychiatric conditions that can result in serious impairments in cognition and behavior. Acute and chronic drug abuse results in significant alteration of the brain activity detectable with quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) methods. The chapter is devoted to reviews of cue-reactivity testing using QEEG in opiate, cocaine, methamphetamine, and alcohol use disorders. Illicit drug use is on rise in the United States, according to the 2020 National Survey of Drug Use and Health, among people aged 12 and older in 2020, 59.3 million people used illicit drugs in the past year. Those figures included 49.6 million marijuana users, 9.3 million pain reliever misusers, 5.2 cocaine users, 2.5 million methamphetamine users, almost 1 million heroin users, and 17.7 million heavy alcohol users. There is a need to understand the neurobiological and behavioral mechanism driving people to substance dependence and how applied neuroscience methods can contribute to this objective. Of special interest in this regard is the role of craving, attentional bias, and cue-reactivity in SUD.