Investigation of Cycloserine as a Smoking Cessation Treatment
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2010-09-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Psychosocial treatments for drug abuse benefit some patients (Rawson et al 2004), but there
is an urgent need for new treatment approaches that can improve treatment outcomes. One new
approach involves facilitation of extinction of conditioned responses through the use of
d-cycloserine, a partial agonist at the NMDA glycine site. This approach has proved useful
for the treatment of several anxiety disorders. For example, treatment with d-cycloserine
enhanced the efficacy of behavioral treatments for acrophobia (Ressler et al 2004) and social
phobia (Hofmann et al 2006) by enhancing extinction of conditioned fear responses. This
suggests that d-cycloserine has potential to enhance the efficacy of behavioral treatments
for drug dependence by enhancing extinction of conditioned responses to drug cues. In this
Phase I Cutting-Edge Basic Research Awards (CEBRA) application we propose a proof-of-concept
study to examine effects of treatment with d-cycloserine for facilitating extinction of
craving provoked by exposure to cigarette smoking cues. The benefits of this treatment
approach together with cognitive behavioral treatment for reducing cigarette smoking will
then be determined. Smoking cues will be presented using an established virtual reality
simulator(Bordnick et al 2004; Bordnick et al 2005a)