One of the major risk factors for global death and disability is alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use. While there is increasing knowledge with respect to individual factors promoting the initiation and maintenance of substance use disorders (SUDs), disease trajectories involved in losing and regaining control over drug intake (ReCoDe) are still not well described. Our newly formed German Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) on ReCoDe has an interdisciplinary approach funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with a 12‐year perspective. The main goals of our research consortium are (i) to identify triggers and modifying factors that longitudinally modulate the trajectories of losing and regaining control over drug consumption in real life, (ii) to study underlying behavioral, cognitive, and neurobiological mechanisms, and (iii) to implicate mechanism‐based interventions. These goals will be achieved by: (i) using mobile health (m‐health) tools to longitudinally monitor the effects of triggers (drug cues, stressors, and priming doses) and modify factors (eg, age, gender, physical activity, and cognitive control) on drug consumption patterns in real‐life conditions and in animal models of addiction; (ii) the identification and computational modeling of key mechanisms mediating the effects of such triggers and modifying factors on goal‐directed, habitual, and compulsive aspects of behavior from human studies and animal models; and (iii) developing and testing interventions that specifically target the underlying mechanisms for regaining control over drug intake.

OBJECTIVE: Starting from a model of impaired response inhibition and salience attribution for addictive behaviour we investigated whether obese participants show a greater impairment of inhibitory control in response to food-associated cues compared with neutral stimuli and whether this is seen in normal-weight control subjects. In addition, we questioned whether an attentional bias towards food-associated cues can be observed in an early stage of information processing. DESIGN: Control-group study including the administration of behavioural tasks (that is, go/no-go task with food-associated and neutral words, visual dot probe task with food-associated and neutral pictures) and self-reported measures of eating behaviour and impulsivity. RESULTS: Although self-reported measures indicated disinhibition of eating behaviour of obese patients, we found that foodassociated stimuli induced an impairment of inhibitory control in both obese participants as well as normal-weight controls.Results from the visual dot-probe task indicated that food-associated cues did not modulate attention allocation in a very early stage of information processing, which suggests that the incentive salience of food-associated stimuli might be lower than that of drug-associated cues. CONCLUSION: These findings are not in line with hypotheses derived from models of addictive behaviour and call into question that an impairment of inhibitory control in response to food-associated cues and salience attribution might be at the core of obesity. Future studies using larger sample sizes and refined experimental procedures are warranted to further investigate mechanisms controlling food intake in obesity.