Joy Schmitz
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Cocaine use disorder is rising in the United States, affecting about 1.4 million people, and cocaine-involved overdoses are increasing. No medication is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat it.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cocaine use disorder
substance use disorder
addiction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Test whether adding active rather than sham deep TMS with an H4 coil to contingency management raises abstinence, increases cocaine-negative urines and reduces craving in people who do not respond to contingency management alone.
- Measure craving through self-report and electroencephalogram (EEG) brain responses to cocaine cues, comparing participants who receive active versus sham theta burst stimulation over eight weeks.
- Explore how treatment works by tracking resting-state functional connectivity, a measure of how brain regions coordinate, and NIDA Phenotyping Assessment Battery traits at three timepoints during treatment.
- Develop a preliminary machine learning model that combines brain connectivity and behavioral trait data to identify which contingency management non-responders are most likely to benefit from added TMS.
More about the research
The best available option is a behavioral treatment called contingency management (CM), which rewards people for drug-free urine tests. Yet many patients do not respond to CM. Earlier work by this group and others links poor response to differences in thinking skills, reward processing and negative emotion.
Why it matters
People with cocaine use disorder have no approved medication, and most do not respond to the best behavioral treatment. A safe, effective pairing of contingency management with deep brain stimulation could improve outcomes for these treatment-resistant patients. A model that predicts who benefits could help match patients to care. The work could eventually support FDA clearance of a combined treatment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Desmond Oathes
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Establish that TMS targeted with resting-state fMRI connectivity modulates the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), a deep mood-related region, using interleaved TMS/fMRI to record brain responses to stimulation.
Zafiris Daskalakis
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare standard, clustered and sham maintenance rTMS over six months in 75 adults with treatment-resistant depression, testing which best sustains connectivity between the DLPFC and SGC measured by TMS-EEG.
L Elliot Hong
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Neuroscience
Test whether 16 weeks of family-based risk reduction therapy normalizes an MRI-based biomarker of schizophrenia-like brain patterns in children aged 9–18 with family risk but no psychotic symptoms.
The school
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: 25 labs on PI Pages, $419M a year on research, 340 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
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