Nelly Alia-Klein
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Long-term cocaine use narrows blood vessels over and over, and that chronic squeezing can damage arteries. Plaque can build up in the carotid arteries of the neck without any symptoms at all, and by the time symptoms appear the artery is usually already damaged and a stroke from reduced blood flow to the brain may follow, a common fatal outcome in cocaine use disorder.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cocaine use disorder
addiction
atherosclerosis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Test whether asymptomatic individuals with cocaine use disorder show carotid artery atherosclerosis, using PET with the 18F-FDG tracer to quantify vessel-wall inflammation and 3D dark-blood MRI to measure plaque burden on a hybrid PET/MRI scanner.
- Determine whether carotid disease markers scale with lifetime cocaine, tobacco and alcohol use, and compare their levels with those in individuals carrying known cardiovascular risk factors but without cocaine use disorder.
- Examine whether carotid artery disease markers correlate with resting-state functional MRI connectivity in brain networks supplied by the internal carotids that subserve salience, control and reward processing.
- Assess whether carotid and brain network measures track cognitive function, particularly attention, memory and executive function, in individuals with cocaine use disorder.
More about the research
Most of what is known about artery disease in this group comes from autopsy studies, because the diagnosis is typically made too late to act on. This project aims to catch the disease early and in living people, and to ask whether carotid artery damage is linked to how the brain works.
Why it matters
People with cocaine use disorder who also smoke and drink face a high risk of artery disease, yet it is usually detected only after a stroke or at autopsy. Showing that combined PET and MRI imaging can reveal plaque and vessel-wall inflammation before symptoms appear could open a window for prevention in this aging population, and linking those markers to brain network function and cognition could help explain the thinking problems seen in long-term cocaine use.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rajesh Narendran
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether hydrocortisone-induced increases in NOP receptors, imaged with the PET tracer [11C]NOP-1A, are smaller in cocaine use disorder than in healthy controls and predict faster relapse over 12 weeks.
Ruth Carper
San Diego State University, CA·Neuroscience
Track changes in brain anatomy, function and connectivity in autistic and typical adults aged 40–70 using multimodal MRI, and relate them to motor, executive and emotional changes.
Paul Laurienti
Wake Forest University, NC·Neuroscience
Determine how nicotine vaping changes brain structure, function, blood flow and connectivity in adolescents, imaging 360 current vapers and never tobacco users twice, 18 months apart.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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