Mark S. Gold

Mark S. Gold, MD

Donald Dizney Eminent Scholar, Distinguished Professor & Chair

Dr. Gold is the Donald Dizney Eminent Scholar, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychiatry. Prior to assuming the position as Chair he was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Anesthesiology, and Community Health & Family Medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He is also a member of the McKnight Brain Institute. Dr. Gold was the first Faculty in the Division of Addiction Medicine and Chief of the Addiction Medicine Division.

Dr Gold is a teacher of the year, researcher and inventor who has worked for >35 years to develop models for understanding the effects of tobacco and other drugs on the brain and behavior. Dr. Gold has developed animal models which have led to new treatments for addicts and also conceptualized hypotheses which were more than novel but also yielded new approaches to treat patients. Under his leadership, the Division of Addiction Medicine at the University of Florida has grown from Dr. Gold in 1990 to 12 full-time clinical physicians treating drug abuse and dependence and an equal number of researchers with major funded projects and research groups in second hand exposure models, self-administration, functional brain imaging, public health, impaired professionals, genomics, proteomics, and nanotechnology.

Research/Educational Interests and Accomplishments

Dr. Gold’s pioneering work on the brain systems underlying the effects of opiate drugs led to a dramatic change in the way opiate action was understood. Gold was the senior author on the discovery paper and was awarded a patent for the discovery of new uses for clonidine (Catapres) which remains widely used for opiate withdrawal and pain management. During the mid-1980s Gold and colleagues developed a new theory for cocaine action in the brain. Gold’s work on cocaine led to a complete change in thinking about cocaine’s addiction liability, acute and chronic actions. His work in this area remains seminal and are considered by many classic examples of translational science. In addition to theory, Dr. Gold’s research has led to changes in the treatment of opiate and also cocaine addiction. Dr Gold, a Distinguished Fellow of the American College of Pharmacology and the American Psychiatric Association, has made many recent contributions to the understanding of the second hand effects of all drugs that are smoked and the consequences of expired medications in closed spaces such as an operating room (see Nature.com, CESAR FAX, and Chemical & Engineering News). Dr. Gold and colleagues have reported on the treatment and outcome of Impaired Health Professionals, especially physicians, for decades. However, in 2005, he put this work and experience together with a nanotechnology finding to develop a new hypothesis for physician addiction and relapse. In 2005, Gold and co-workers were first to demonstrate that intravenously administered anesthetics and analgesics were exhaled and these controlled and dangerous substances are active in the air of operating rooms and other sites where given to patients. Second-hand drug exposure, like second hand tobacco smoke, is being studied in self-administration, fMRI, and proteomic studies in his research group. In this case, the research is going from man and the operating room to animal models as Gold tries to explain the role of the workplace environment in physician drug abuse ,addictions, and relapse of anesthesiologist’s after successful treatment (http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2004/1026/2). Gold has an interest in clinical hypothesis driven research as well as basic to bedside. He has worked to explain why people drink so much decaffeinated coffee -- it's not caffeine free -- (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061012185602.htm) and why some patients who have abused drugs do not recover or return to pre morbid neurological function once they stop using (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/90267.php). Dr. Gold has helped to focus on drug consequences and deaths rather than simply survey data of use and users to identify trends and also problems and then try to target prevention (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/54427.php).

Over the past two decades, Dr. Gold has pioneered the hypothesis of hedonic overeating or pathological attachment to food as an addiction. This work is much less controversial now that many recognize the similarities between great food and compulsive overeating and other process addictions such as gambling and sex (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-07-09-food-addiction_N.htm). Dr. Gold has recently Co-Chaired an Experts Conference at Yale with Kelly Brownell (http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=1581) and an American Society of Addiction Medicine Symposium to focus attention on the great progress that has been made in evaluating and extending this hypothesis over the past decade. This work has also to new approaches to treat the obese as well as to prevent overeating in recent post-addicts. Dr. Gold and his nanotechnology colleagues at the McKnight Brain Institute have been awarded recent patents for the invention of breath tests for propofol, drugs of abuse, and medications which someday may become as commonplace as breathalyzer for alcohol intoxication or blood testing. Dr. Gold has also been a co-inventor for the invention of breath tests for adherence, compliance and therapeutic drug monitoring for medications used to treat epilepsy and other medical conditions. With major collaborations within the McKnight Brain Institute Gold has expanded his work to include drug-related brain cell injury and death and stem cell repair. Dr. Gold and his research group are currently working with Bart Hoebel, Ph.D. at Princeton on “sugar addiction” and drug abuse-like effects, Kelly Brownell, PhD and the Rudd Center on Food Policy, Linda Cotler, PhD at Washington University on physician addictions and recovery, Jean Lud Cadet, MD on neurotoxicty of drug exposure and also at UF with Henry Baker, PhD in genomics, and with Dennis Steindler, Ph.D. McKnight Brain Institute Director on stem cell augmenting methods and inventions to reverse the neurotoxic and other effects of drugs of abuse. Drs. Gold and Steindler are embarking on a revolutionary research initiative to reverse drug and alcohol-related brain cell injury and loss with stem cells.

Dr. Gold has been able to mentor MD, PhD, and MD/PhD students at the University of Florida as part of a degree program and also as part of the University of Florida College of Medicine’s research track and two of these medical students have been awarded Howard Hughes Research Fellowships in the past few years. Dr. Gold and the Division provide basic science of addiction training in Pharmacology, Human Behavior, and Medical Neuroscience for all UF medical students. Most recently, he has developed and UF medical students have begun mandatory two-week clerkships in addiction medicine during their clinical rotations. Since physicians learn how to evaluate and treat patients by watching and learning at the bedside, this new program is very important to the millions of patients in the State of Florida and elsewhere who might go to a physician for a tobacco, alcohol, drug or overeating problem. UF is the first medical school to expect clinical competency in addiction medicine just like obstetrics or neurology or surgery. UF is a national teaching site for the Annenberg medical student summer training program in addiction medicine. Over the past 30+ years, Gold has written book chapters, practice guidelines, edited textbooks, and developed self-learning modules to increase access to state-of-the-art addiction research and practices. Recently, Gold has been the author of Performance Enhancing Medications and Drugs of Abuse and also Dual Disorders. He has mentored many of the nation’s current leaders in eating disorders and addiction education and research.

Leadership and Service

Dr. Gold has been a leader at the University, State, National and International level in drug abuse prevention, treatment advocacy and research. He has been a member of various Chair Search Committees, the Admissions Committee, the Curriculum Committee, and the Director of the Alcohol Education Center and Impaired Physicians Task Force here at UF. Nationally, Dr. Gold has worked with a variety of governmental agencies concerned with drug use and youth. Dr. Gold has worked to reduce stigma and increase access to treatment as a contributor to the national drug strategy, advisor, participant in consensus panels, and with the National Institutes. Dr. Gold is an Editor of the Journal of Addictive Disease, Editorial Board member of a number of Journals and reviewer for many, many more. He reviews more than 20 journal articles yearly. Dr. Gold is a member of the University of Florida College of Medicine’s Alumni Board of Directors, Betty Ford Institute Board in Palm Springs, California and Washington University’s Undergraduate Experience Board of Directors, and also serves on the Board of the Institute for Behavioral and Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Gold is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University in St Louis where he also was awarded the 1989 Distinguished Alumni Award. He has served CASA as an expert panelist on four occasions, most recently on treatment efficacy and parity. He was an Honors Graduate of the University of Florida College of Medicine where he was also AOA and a Wall of Fame award recipient. Dr Gold was awarded the 2004 Conway Hunter Society Award, The American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry’s Founders Award in 2005, the prestigious annual Nelson J. Bradley, M.D. life time achievement award by the NAATP their at their 2006 Annual Conference. Gold has also received awards from DARE and also DEA for decades of volunteer service. Dr. Gold has been awarded Exemplary Teaching and Minority Mentoring Awards from the University of Florida College of Medicine and an Inventor Award from the University of Florida’s Office of Technology Transfer for the licensing of one of his patents. Dr. Gold has been listed as one of the Best Doctors® in America.

Since beginning his career in research at the University of Florida in 1970, he has been the author of over 900 medical articles, chapters, and abstracts in journals for health professionals on a wide variety of psychiatric research subjects and authoring twelve professional books including practice guidelines, ASAM core competencies, and medical text books for primary care professionals. He is the author of 15 general audience books. According to a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 272:18, 1996), “Mark S. Gold, M.D. the most prolific and brilliant of the addiction experts writing today… Dr. Gold has spent his career trying to bridge the gap in medical education and practice with the belief that addictions are diseases and that all physicians have a critical role in prevention and, if that fails, in early identification and prompt treatment.”