ASU Scholarship Showcase

Illicit psychostimulant addiction remains a significant problem worldwide, despite decades of research into the neural underpinnings and various treatment approaches. The purpose of this review is to provide a succinct overview of the neurocircuitry involved in drug addiction, as well as the acute and chronic effects of cocaine and amphetamines within this circuitry in humans. Investigational pharmacological treatments for illicit psychostimulant addiction are also reviewed. Our current knowledge base clearly demonstrates that illicit psychostimulants produce lasting adaptive neural and behavioral changes that contribute to the progression and maintenance of addiction. However, attempts at generating pharmacological treatments for psychostimulant addiction have historically focused on intervening at the level of the acute effects of these drugs. The lack of approved pharmacological treatments for psychostimulant addiction highlights the need for new treatment strategies, especially those that prevent or ameliorate the adaptive neural, cognitive, and behavioral changes caused by chronic use of this class of illicit drugs.

Contemporary human populations conform to ecogeographic predictions that animals will become more compact in cooler climates and less compact in warmer ones. However, it remains unclear to what extent this pattern reflects plastic responses to current environments or genetic differences among populations. Analyzing anthropometric surveys of 232,684 children and adults from across 80 ethnolinguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Americas, we confirm that body surface-to-volume correlates with contemporary temperature at magnitudes found in more latitudinally diverse samples (Adj. R² = 0.14-0.28). However, far more variation in body surface-to-volume is attributable to genetic population structure (Adj. R² = 0.50-0.74). Moreover, genetic population structure accounts for nearly all of the observed relationship between contemporary temperature and body surface-to-volume among children and adults. Indeed, after controlling for population structure, contemporary temperature accounts for no more than 4% of the variance in body form in these groups. This effect of genetic affinity on body form is also independent of other ecological variables, such as dominant mode of subsistence and household wealth per capita. These findings suggest that the observed fit of human body surface-to-volume with current climate in this sample reflects relatively large effects of existing genetic population structure of contemporary humans compared to plastic response to current environments.

Background: The transition from the home to college is a phase in which emerging adults shift toward more unhealthy eating and physical activity patterns, higher body mass indices, thus increasing risk of overweight/obesity. Currently, little is understood about how changing friendship networks shape weight gain behaviors. This paper describes the recruitment, data collection, and data analytic protocols for the SPARC (Social impact of Physical Activity and nutRition in College) study, a longitudinal examination of the mechanisms by which friends and friendship networks influence nutrition and physical activity behaviors and weight gain in the transition to college life.

Methods: The SPARC study aims to follow 1450 university freshmen from a large university over an academic year, collecting data on multiple aspects of friends and friendship networks. Integrating multiple types of data related to student lives, ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) are administered via a cell phone application, devilSPARC. EMAs collected in four 1-week periods (a total of 4 EMA waves) are integrated with linked data from web-based surveys and anthropometric measurements conducted at four times points (for a total of eight data collection periods including EMAs, separated by ~1 month). University databases will provide student card data, allowing integration of both time-dated data on food purchasing, use of physical activity venues, and geographical information system (GIS) locations of these activities relative to other students in their social networks.

Discussion: Findings are intended to guide the development of more effective interventions to enhance behaviors among college students that protect against weight gain during college.

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a risk factor for tobacco use and dependence. This study examines the responsiveness to nicotine of an adolescent model of ADHD, the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR). The conditioned place preference (CPP) procedure was used to assess nicotine-induced locomotion and conditioned reward in SHR and the Wistar Kyoto (WKY) control strain over a range of nicotine doses (0.0, 0.1, 0.3 and 0.6 mg/kg). Prior to conditioning, SHRs were more active and less biased toward one side of the CPP chamber than WKY rats. Following conditioning, SHRs developed CPP to the highest dose of nicotine (0.6 mg/kg), whereas WKYs did not develop CPP to any nicotine dose tested. During conditioning, SHRs displayed greater locomotor activity in the nicotine-paired compartment than in the saline-paired compartment across conditioning trials. SHRs that received nicotine (0.1, 0.3, 0.6 mg/kg) in the nicotine-paired compartment showed an increase in locomotor activity between conditioning trials. Nicotine did not significantly affect WKY locomotor activity. These findings suggest that the SHR strain is a suitable model for studying ADHD-related nicotine use and dependence, but highlights potential limitations of the WKY control strain and the CPP procedure for modeling ADHD-related nicotine reward.

Positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) of α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) receptors are a diverse class of compounds that increase fast excitatory transmission in the brain. AMPA PAMs have been shown to facilitate long-term potentiation, strengthen communication between various cortical and subcortical regions, and some of these compounds increase the production and release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in an activity-dependent manner. Through these mechanisms, AMPA PAMs have shown promise as broad spectrum pharmacotherapeutics in preclinical and clinical studies for various neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. In recent years, a small collection of preclinical animal studies has also shown that AMPA PAMs may have potential as pharmacotherapeutic adjuncts to extinction-based or cue-exposure therapies for the treatment of drug addiction. The present paper will review this preclinical literature, discuss novel data collected in our laboratory, and recommend future research directions for the possible development of AMPA PAMs as anti-addiction medications.

We present a new approach to computing event shape distributions or, more precisely, charge flow correlations in a generic conformal field theory (CFT). These infrared finite observables are familiar from collider physics studies and describe the angular distribution of global charges in outgoing radiation created from the vacuum by some source. The charge flow correlations can be expressed in terms of Wightman correlation functions in a certain limit. We explain how to compute these quantities starting from their Euclidean analogues by means of a nontrivial analytic continuation which, in the framework of CFT, can be performed elegantly in Mellin space. The relation between the charge flow correlations and Euclidean correlation functions can be reformulated directly in configuration space, bypassing the Mellin representation, as a certain Lorentzian double discontinuity of the correlation function integrated along the cuts. We illustrate the general formalism in N = 4 SYM, making use of the well-known results on the four-point correlation function of half-BPS scalar operators. We compute the double scalar flow correlation in N = 4 SYM, at weak and strong coupling and show that it agrees with known results obtained by different techniques. One of the remarkable features of the N = 4 theory is that the scalar and energy flow correlations are proportional to each other. Imposing natural physical conditions on the energy flow correlations (finiteness, positivity and regularity), we formulate additional constraints on the four-point correlation functions in N = 4SYM that should be valid at any coupling and away from the planar limit.

The Operator Product Expansion for null polygonal Wilson loop in planar maximally supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory runs systematically in terms of multi-particle pentagon transitions which encode the physics of excitations propagating on the color flux tube ending on the sides of the four-dimensional contour. Their dynamics was unraveled in the past several years and culminated in a complete description of pentagons as an exact function of the 't Hooft coupling. In this paper we provide a solution for the last building block in this program, the SU(4) matrix structure arising from internal symmetry indices of scalars and fermions. This is achieved by a recursive solution of the Mirror and Watson equations obeyed by the so-called singlet pentagons and fixing the form of the twisted component in their tensor decomposition. The non-singlet, or charged, pentagons are deduced from these by a limiting procedure.

We address the near-collinear expansion of NMHV six-particle scattering amplitudes at strong value of the 't Hooft coupling in planar maximally supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory. We complement recent studies of this observable within the context of the Pentagon Operator Product Expansion, via the dual superWilson loop description, by studying effects of multiple scalar exchanges that accompany (or not) massive flux-tube excitations. Due to the fact that holes have a very small, nonperturbatively generated mass m_h which is exponentially suppressed in the 't Hooft coupling, their exchanges must be resummed in the ultraviolet limit, T <<1/m_h. This procedure yields a contribution to the expectation value of the superloop which enters on equal footing with the classical area — a phenomenon which was earlier observed for MHV amplitudes. In all components, the near-massless scalar exchanges factorize from the ones of massive particles, at leading order in strong coupling.

Scattering amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric gauge theory receive a dual description in terms of the expectation value of the super Wilson loop stretched on a null polygonal contour. This makes the analysis amenable to nonperturbative techniques. Presently, we elaborate on a refined form of the operator product expansion in terms of pentagon transitions to compute twist-two contributions to NMHV amplitudes. To start with, we provide a novel derivation of scattering matrices starting from Baxter equations for flux-tube excitations propagating on magnon background. We propose bootstrap equations obeyed by pentagon form factors with nonsinglet quantum numbers with respect to the R-symmetry group and provide solutions to them to all orders in 't Hooft coupling. These are then successfully confronted against available perturbative calculations for NMHV amplitudes to four-loop order.