Marie Eikemo
Marie Eikemo, postdoktor, UiO
Hovedinnhold
- Reward and value-based decision-making
- Stress and pain responses
- Opioid system psychopharmacology
- Functional neuroimaging (fMRI)
Research interests: My research interests center on reward behavior, hedonic experience, and value-based decision-making. More specifically, I study the functions of the human opioid receptor system (where the endorphins act) and how opioids drugs influence reward, pain, decisions, abuse liability and stress responses. I investigate these processes in a range of different groups, including patients with substance use and misuse, surgical patients, patients with chronic or acute pain as well as healthy volunteers. My work is fundamentally translational and has largely sought to test hypotheses derived from non-human animal research in the healthy brain and in clinical groups where the opioid receptor system functions could be disrupted.
My background is from cognitive psychology and neuroscience and I have a PhD form the Norwegian Centre for Addiction Research at the Medical Faculty at the University of Oslo. In my first postdoc I did pharmacological imaging (fMRI) with opioids at the Department of Diagnostic Physics at Oslo University Hospital.
One of my main current research goals is understanding how psychosocial stress influences abuse liability, experience, and cognitive effects of opioid drugs. This is a key research question in a large ongoing experimental pharmacological study (ERC OPIOIDREWARD), that I am running together with researchers from the Leknes Affective Brain Lab (LABlab) at the Department of Psychology, UiO. In two separate clinical studies we are investigating similar research questions in a hospital setting - where a large number of patients receive opioids prior to day surgery at Oslo University Hospital (OUS) and Kongsberg Hospital.
I am also involved in several projects that seek to understand how opioid drugs influence reward, stress, and pain responses in patients with opioid use disorder who are receiving pharmacotreatment for opioid use disorder with drugs that either stimulate or block the opioid system. In parallel, we study effects of these drugs in healthy participants using pharmacological designs, sometimes in combination with functional neuroimaging.
Contact information:
https://www.sv.uio.no/psi/english/people/aca/mariehei/index.html
