Concerned about your own or
someone else’s drug use?

Relapse after methamphetamine rehabilitation treatment is common. A possible reason for this is that people with methamphetamine use disorder develop “approach bias”, an automatic, impulsive tendency to approach or seek methamphetamine in response to signals in the environment (e.g., images, smells, etc.) that have become strongly associated with methamphetamine. Earlier research on alcohol dependence has shown that computerised approach bias modification (ApBM) training can help reduce the likelihood of relapse after people leave treatment. In an earlier pilot study, we had promising findings suggesting that ApBM might help in reducing relapse to methamphetamine following discharge from treatment. The ApBM training involves repeatedly practising the avoidance of methamphetamine images displayed on a laptop and the approaching of positive images. We are now running a randomised controlled trial of ApBM during methamphetamine treatment at rehabilitation service to determine its effectiveness.

We are running a pilot RCT of a 3-week course of personalised ApBM (6 sessions) during a 1-month residential program. Patients will be randomised to receive either:

1. Personalised ABM, where they are trained to “avoid” images of methamphetamine and “approach” healthy (i.e., non-drug) images (by responding to images using a joy-stick) that they have selected from a standard picture set based on the relevance of the pictures to them.
2. A “sham” (control) condition in which training involves the standard set of images (i.e. not personalised), and in which they will not be systematically trained to “avoid” methamphetamine images or “approach” positive images.

Participants are followed up 1- and 3-months post-discharge from rehabilitation to determine whether personalised ApBM reduces methamphetamine use, craving, methamphetamine use disorders criteria and methamphetamine approach bias, relative to patients who receive “sham” training. If effective, this intervention would be easily translated into standard practice at the recruitment sites and elsewhere, as it requires minimal equipment (only a laptop and joystick) and does not require any training or special skills for clinical staff to implement.