Proposing a "Brain Health Checkup (BHC)" as a Global Potential "Standard of Care" to Overcome Reward Dysregulation in Primary Care Medicine: Coupling Genetic Risk Testing and Induction of "Dopamine Homeostasis"

Eric R Braverman; Catherine A Dennen; Mark S Gold; Abdalla Bowirrat; Ashim Gupta; David Baron; A Kenison Roy; David E Smith; Jean Lud Cadet; Kenneth Blum

doi:10.3390/ijerph19095480

Proposing a "Brain Health Checkup (BHC)" as a Global Potential "Standard of Care" to Overcome Reward Dysregulation in Primary Care Medicine: Coupling Genetic Risk Testing and Induction of "Dopamine Homeostasis"

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Apr 30;19(9):5480. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19095480.

Authors

Eric R Braverman¹, Catherine A Dennen¹, Mark S Gold^{2

3}, Abdalla Bowirrat⁴, Ashim Gupta⁵, David Baron⁶, A Kenison Roy³, David E Smith⁷, Jean Lud Cadet⁸, Kenneth Blum^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ The Kenneth Blum Institute on Behavior & Neurogenetics, Austin, TX 78701, USA.
² Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
³ Department of Psychiatry, Tulane School of Medicine, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA.
⁴ Department of Molecular Biology, Adelson School of Medicine, Ariel University, Ariel 40700, Israel.
⁵ Future Biologics, Lawrenceville, GA 30043, USA.
⁶ Division of Addiction Research & Education, Center for Psychiatry, Medicine & Primary Care (Office of Provost), Western University Health Sciences, Pomona, CA 91766, USA.
⁷ Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
⁸ The Molecular Neuropsychiatry Research Branch, NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA.

Abstract

In 2021, over 100,000 people died prematurely from opioid overdoses. Neuropsychiatric and cognitive impairments are underreported comorbidities of reward dysregulation due to genetic antecedents and epigenetic insults. Recent genome-wide association studies involving millions of subjects revealed frequent comorbidity with substance use disorder (SUD) in a sizeable meta-analysis of depression. It found significant associations with the expression of NEGR1 in the hypothalamus and DRD2 in the nucleus accumbens, among others. However, despite the rise in SUD and neuropsychiatric illness, there are currently no standard objective brain assessments being performed on a routine basis. The rationale for encouraging a standard objective Brain Health Check (BHC) is to have extensive data available to treat clinical syndromes in psychiatric patients. The BHC would consist of a group of reliable, accurate, cost-effective, objective assessments involving the following domains: Memory, Attention, Neuropsychiatry, and Neurological Imaging. Utilizing primarily PUBMED, over 36 years of virtually all the computerized and written-based assessments of Memory, Attention, Psychiatric, and Neurological imaging were reviewed, and the following assessments are recommended for use in the BHC: Central Nervous System Vital Signs (Memory), Test of Variables of Attention (Attention), Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory III (Neuropsychiatric), and Quantitative Electroencephalogram/P300/Evoked Potential (Neurological Imaging). Finally, we suggest continuing research into incorporating a new standard BHC coupled with qEEG/P300/Evoked Potentials and genetically guided precision induction of "dopamine homeostasis" to diagnose and treat reward dysregulation to prevent the consequences of dopamine dysregulation from being epigenetically passed on to generations of our children.

Keywords: Brain Health Check (BHC); P300; attention; epigenetics; genetic addiction risk scores; memory; neuropsychiatry; qEEG; reward dysregulation; substance use disorder (SUD).

Publication types

Meta-Analysis
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Brain
Child
Dopamine*
Genome-Wide Association Study
Homeostasis
Humans
Primary Health Care
Reward
Substance-Related Disorders* / genetics

Substances

Dopamine

Grants and funding

Funding was provided by The Kenneth Blum Institute on Behavior and Neurogenetics, Austin, TX. 78701, USA, and NIDA intramural program for JLC.