Understanding cocaine addiction is central to treating it. Scientists have long known that there are certain areas of the brain related to pleasure and reward that are activated by certain behaviors, like eating dessert or using drugs or alcohol. The research in this area has been narrowing down the region and specific neurons involved with cocaine addiction.
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New studies are showing that those who may have an addiction to salt, can also be more apt to a cocaine or heroin addiction. Scientists in the United States and Australia have discovered that there is a correlation between salt and other drugs in the hypothalamus portion of the brain.
A new study from researchers at Spain’s University of Granada has found that drug abusers have difficulty identifying negative emotions (such as anger, disgust, fear, and sadness) by their facial expressions. In addition, the study found that regular abuse of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine usually affects the users’ fluency and decision-making. Cocaine abuse is associated with changes in inhibition, and marijuana and cocaine use negatively affects work memory and reasoning.
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Researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have become the first to find a link between specific neurons and alterations in the “reward” people feel after taking cocaine. Mary Kay Lobo, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and first author of the study, said that they found that the two main neurons in the nucleus accumbens (an important part of the brain’s reward center) have opposite effects on cocaine reward.
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Alcohol abuse and addiction can increase risk of obesity due to a rise in body mass index (BMI), according to previous research. Now, a new study has found that excessive alcohol use not only heightens BMI, but this increase is also linked to lower levels of brain function as a result of this joint action.
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A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don’t, and found damaged nerve tissue in the brains of the teens who drank. NPR’s Michelle Trudeau writes that the researchers believe this damage negatively affects attention span in boys, as well as girls’ ability to comprehend and interpret visual information.
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New research suggests that fruit flies, which are already used to study dozens of human diseases, could be used as a simpler and more convenient model for studying the effects of cocaine and other drugs on the brain. The study appears online in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a new monthly journal.
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When some parents discover that their child has been using alcohol or drugs, they brush it off as “inevitable” or assume that it’s okay for adolescents to experiment with substances. However, what many parents may not know is that any amount of “experimenting” can harm their child’s developing brain, sometimes creating irreversible damage.
Besides affecting lives, careers, health, and memory, alcohol also damages relationships. Alcoholics have long been known to have difficulty reading emotional cues, which can range from taking offense when none was intended to failing to pick up on a loved one’s feelings of anger or joy, but it was never known how or why—until now.
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A new study shows that memory loss associated with marijuana use is caused by the drug’s interference with the brain’s natural protein synthesis machinery. Though it has been documented that marijuana impairs memory, the exact mechanism was previously unknown.
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