Sleep and Emotional Reactivity in Alcohol Use Disorder

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a multifaceted, chronic relapsing disorder suffered by millions of men and women in the United States. AUD is associated with disrupted sleep continuity and architecture, which impact health-related quality of life, and contribute to relapse. However, many alcohol-sleep interactions and their underlying mechanisms remain unclear, especially those involving AUD and chronic sleep problems. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is altered long into abstinence, with excess duration and intensity of REM sleep, which is a predictor of relapse. Emotion deficits, including affective flattening and mesocorticolimbic hypo-responsiveness to emotional stimuli, are also consistent findings in AUD and predictors of relapse. Here, our investigators bring these two components together, building on an emerging literature showing that REM sleep is important for neural emotion regulation, calibrating emotions to promote next-day adaptive emotional functioning. Our investigators propose that the REM sleep-emotion pathway is dysfunctional in AUD, contributing to the deficits in emotion regulation in AUD shown by us and others, which could then lead to increased craving and relapse. Our investigators study male and female AUD patients compared to age- and gender-matched healthy controls, using 2 within-subject sleep conditions: uninterrupted sleep; selective REM sleep reduction, followed by functional neuroimaging with emotion reactivity and regulation tasks the following morning. Our investigators aim to determine specific effects of experimental REM sleep reduction on next-day neural emotional reactivity in AUD compared to healthy controls and compared to a night of uninterrupted sleep