Cecilia Hinojosa
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience·Early-career
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use disorder (AUD) often occur together. Women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, and alcohol harms women's health more than men's.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
posttraumatic stress disorder
alcohol use disorder
alcohol craving
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Define sex differences in reward-related brain circuitry, including the striatum, that relate to alcohol craving and drinking in trauma-exposed women and men, using functional neuroimaging.
- Track alcohol craving and consumption in daily life with ecological momentary assessment (EMA), repeated real-time self-reports, in trauma-exposed participants.
- Link brain reward responses to real-world drinking patterns over time by applying longitudinal statistical models to combined EMA and neuroimaging data.
More about the research
Many studies have looked at the brain basis of each disorder separately. Very few have studied the two together, and none have asked whether the brain changes differ between women and men. This project asks how trauma might change the brain's reward system in ways that make women more likely to drink.
Why it matters
Trauma-exposed women face a high risk of PTSD and serious health harm from alcohol. Identifying the reward-circuit differences that push them toward drinking could inform prevention strategies that stop alcohol use disorder from developing in this group. It could also help clinicians better understand why PTSD and alcohol problems so often appear together.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennifer P. Read
University at Buffalo, NY·Psychology
Examine how momentary changes in PTSD symptoms predict urges to drink, alcohol seeking and drinking among 110 adults with PTSD, using 14 days of ecological momentary assessment with several phone surveys a day.
Uraina Clark
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Psychology
Identify brain changes linked to stereotype threat-induced impulsivity by scanning 280 adults who drink regularly with fMRI while they complete an impulsivity task before and after exposure.
Constance Guille
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Use daily Ecological Momentary Assessment over 12 postpartum weeks to determine whether increases in stress, anxiety and craving, and declines in mood and sleep quality, are associated with return to cannabis use.
The school
University of New Mexico: 27 labs on PI Pages, $355M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.