Nathalie Rieser

PhD Candidate at University of Zurich

Talk date & time :

Sunday 12:30-13:30

Two billion people globally consume alcohol, resulting in 2.8 million deaths (5.2% of all deaths) in 2016. Even though a wide range of medication has been approved for the treatment of alcohol use disorders (AUD), their efficacy is severely limited. In the 1950ies and 60ies early studies tested the clinical use of psychedelics in the treatment of addiction disorders and reported promising efficacy results and safety data. In more recent studies, psilocybin showed promising results in the treatment of AUD. However, mechanisms of action are still widely unknown.

Therefore, in this talk, the potential underlying mechanisms of action will be presented and discussed in light of our current ongoing clinical trial investigating psilocybin in the treatment of AUD.

Nathalie Rieser studied Psychology (focus: Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience) at the University of Zurich. For her Master's Thesis, she conducted an fMRI-study investigating the effect of n-Acetylcysteine in cocaine users. During her studies, she worked as a research assistant in Cognitive Psychology (Zurich), Comparative Linguistics using EEG (Zurich), and at the Institute of Addiction Research (Amsterdam, NL). Nathalie is currently working on the effects of psychedelics in alcohol dependent patients and healthy controls.