Leveraging meta-regression to test if medication effects on cue-induced craving are associated with clinical efficacy

The alcohol cue exposure paradigm is a common method for evaluating new treatments for alcohol use disorder (AUD); however, it is unclear if medication-related reductions in cue-induced craving in the human laboratory can predict the clinical success of those medications in reducing alcohol consumption during clinical trials. To use a novel meta-analytic approach to test whether medication effect sizes on cue-induced alcohol craving are associated with clinical efficacy in clinical trials. We searched the literature for medications tested for AUD treatment using both the alcohol cue-reactivity paradigm and randomized clinical trials (RCTs). For alcohol cue-reactivity studies, we computed medication effect sizes for cue-induced alcohol craving (k = 36 studies, 15 medications). For RCTs, we calculated medication effect sizes for heavy drinking and abstinence (k = 139 studies, 19 medications). Using medication as the unit of analysis, we applied the Williamson-York bivariate weighted least squares estimation to account for errors in both independent and dependent variables. We also conducted leave-one-out cross validation simulations to examine the predictive utility of cue-craving medication effect sizes on RCT heavy drinking and abstinence endpoints. There was no significant relationship between medication effects on cue-induced alcohol craving in the human laboratory and medication effects on heavy drinking ( β = 0.253, SE = 0.189, p = 0.090) and abstinence ( β = 0.829, SE = 0.747, p = 0.133) in RCTs. The preliminary results of the current study challenge the assumption that alcohol cue-reactivity alone can be used as an early efficacy indicator for AUD pharmacotherapy development. These findings suggest that a wider range of early efficacy indicators and experimental paradigms be considered for Phase II testing of novel compounds.