Easter Seals and the Brain Plasticity Institute: Working Together

Addiction

The Issue:

• Nearly 18 million Americans, or 8.5 percent, meet stringent (DSM-IV) medical criteria for alcohol abuse and alcoholism.
• The economic cost of alcohol addiction in the U.S. is about $200-300 billion annually.
• The age and sex-adjusted percentage of adults who had five or more drinks in one day at least once in the past year was 19.4 percent for Hispanic adults, 27.1 percent for non-Hispanic white adults, and 14.5 percent for non-Hispanic black adults.
• An estimated 12.8 million Americans, about 6 percent of the household population aged twelve and older, use illegal drugs on a current basis -- within the past thirty days. (National Criminal Justice Reference Service)
• The social and health costs to society of illicit drug use are staggering. Drug-related illness, death, and crime cost the nation approximately $66.9 billion. Every man, woman, and child in America pays nearly $1,000 annually to cover the expense of unnecessary health care, extra law enforcement, auto accidents, crime, and lost productivity resulting from substance abuse. (National Criminal Justice Reference Service)

Taking on Alcoholism and Other Addictions

Easter Seals has enlisted the help of the Brain Plasticity Institute in San Francisco to apply their recent breakthroughs in cognitive training and brain plasticity research to construct a computer-based, cognitive training program that will contribute to the more rapid, reliable and complete rehabilitation of persons dealing with alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine, prescription drug, or other substance abuse. Recent studies have given us a clear understanding of the strongly overlapping neurological distortions that underlie different addictive behaviors. We now know that such neurological distortions can be substantially corrected by applying brain plasticity-based training designed to:

• Enhance deteriorated cognitive abilities, which have been demonstrated to promote success in rehabilitation.
• Re-normalize impulse control to correct the neurological distortions underlying destructive impulsive responding.
• Weaken the exaggerated cognitive power of environmental stimuli associated with drinking, and
• re-balance the cognitive reward system for nonalcohol or drug-related versus alcohol or drug-related behaviors.

The suite of exercises being developed at BPI will run on a platform developed to treat other cognitive disorders, such as age-related impairment, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, and depression. It re-purposes already-proven exercises, while also developing entirely new ones. This program suite should have a major impact on treatment success for alcohol and other substance abusers. Because these strategies help normalize the neurology of the person who abuses substances on a level that is not achievable with conventional treatments, they should very significantly reduce the probability of relapse back into addiction.

The Brain Plasticity Institute

Brain training in appropriate forms can contribute to more rapid, more reliable and more complete rehabilitation for individuals who abuse alcohol and other substances. Fundamental and cognitive neuroscience studies conducted over the past two decades provide a clear understanding of the strongly overlapping neurological distortions that underlie these addictive behaviors. BPI scientists propose to ‘correct’ these distortions by applying brain plasticity-based training designed to reduce craving, re-balance distorted reward-system machinery, ameliorate failing impulse-control processes, and broadly restore the impaired perceptual, cognitive and social control abilities that impedes rehabilitation. This approach is based on BPI’s application of brain plasticity-based strategies that have already been effectively applied to address neurological distortions that mark related clinical conditions. In these earlier studies, BPI has developed a large part of the proven training program suite that shall be directed here in new, addiction-targeting forms, to help millions of individuals achieve more complete rehabilitation from alcoholism and substance abuse.

BPI will construct programs designed to weaken craving, re-establish a more normal balance of the brain’s ‘reward system’ machinery, and bring impulsive actions back under better control. These brain exercises broadly restore the perceptual, cognitive and social control abilities of individuals in treatment to increase the probability that they can recover and grow their resilience so that they can sustain a more effective, normal life. The brain training program suite will be designed to operate synergistically with and strengthen, not replace, current treatment programs designed to help individuals with alcohol and drug addictions. By inviting the professionals who administer these programs into the loop to monitor an individual’s treatment progress, and by providing participants with a social networking strategy that can help assure the successful completion of a more-effective rehabilitation program in the treatment center, and in their work and home environments, these treatment exercises hold the prospect of revolutionizing our medical approach to addiction. After validating the effectiveness of this brain plasticity-based approach among the American population, a second-level goal would be to adapt this approach and make it available globally through therapist-monitored training delivered via the Internet. The potential human and societal benefits are enormous.

Help us help scientists and researchers at the Brain Plasticity Institute meet this great human challenge.