LORETA Z-Score Neurofeedback and Dot-Probe Cognitive Rehabilitation for Reducing Addiction Severity in Patients with Opioid Use Disorder Receiving Methadone Maintenance Treatment: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.

A small pilot found numerical improvements in addiction-severity domains after LORETA Z-score neurofeedback and dot-probe training alongside methadone treatment. The study is encouraging but cannot establish that either added program outperformed the control condition.

Faridi A, Taremian F, Najafi-Dehjalali R, Thatcher RW.
Clinical EEG and neuroscience · Publication date: 2026-09-30
Added to site: 2026-10-01
DOI: 10.1177/15500594261494405

Electronic publication date verified in PubMed and Crossref. This source date is separate from the site's addition date.

Modalities

Neurofeedback, LORETA, Live Z-Score

Clinical focus

Opioid use disorder, Addiction severity, Methadone maintenance

Population

Men with opioid use disorder receiving methadone maintenance treatment

Sample

30 men randomized across LORETA Z-score neurofeedback, dot-probe cognitive rehabilitation and methadone-maintenance-only groups

Intervention / method

Twenty LORETA Z-score neurofeedback sessions or 15 individual dot-probe sessions over two weeks, compared with continued methadone maintenance alone

Comparator

Dot-probe cognitive rehabilitation and methadone maintenance alone; no sham-neurofeedback condition

Clinician summary

The abstract reports within-group ASI improvements, with the LORETA Z-score group showing numerical gains in employment/support, family/social, psychiatric and drug-use subcomponents. It explicitly states that a robust between-group interaction analysis was unavailable.

How to interpret the findings

Only 30 men were randomized across three groups. There was no sham-neurofeedback control, group-specific denominators and numerical ASI estimates were not provided in the abstract, and the follow-up interval was not reported. The pilot findings require a fully powered trial with prespecified between-group testing.

Equipment and disclosures

The abstract identifies LORETA Z-score neurofeedback but does not identify the amplifier, software, electrode montage, normative database or protocol thresholds. No equipment attribution is made.

Funding and competing-interest statements were not available in the authoritative indexed abstract checked for this summary.

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