Some good news: A new line of research into the science of addiction

Drug addiction is a human plague. Once a person, specifically their brain, gets hooked, it is really hard to break free of an addiction. Scientists are now looking at the brains of some people hooked on cigarettes who were able to stop smoking after they suffered brain damage from a stroke. This is a major advance in understanding the science of addiction. The New York Times writes:

Taking a scan of an injured brain often produces a map of irretrievable losses, revealing spots where damage causes memory difficulties or tremors.

But in rare cases, those scans can expose just the opposite: plots of brain regions where an injury miraculously relieves someone’s symptoms, offering clues about how doctors might accomplish the same.

A team of researchers has now taken a fresh look at a set of such brain images, drawn from cigarette smokers addicted to nicotine in whom strokes or other injuries spontaneously helped them quit. The results, the scientists said, showed a network of interconnected brain regions that they believe underpins addiction-related disorders affecting potentially tens of millions of Americans.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on Monday, supports an idea that has recently gained traction: that addiction lives not in one brain region or another, but rather in a circuit of regions linked by threadlike nerve fibers.

The results may provide a clearer set of targets for addiction treatments that deliver electrical pulses to the brain, new techniques that have shown promise in helping people quit smoking.

“One of the biggest problems in addiction is that we don’t really know where in the brain the main problem lies that we should target with treatment,” said Dr. Juho Joutsa, one of the study’s lead authors and a neurologist at the University of Turku in Finland. “We are hoping that after this, we have a very good idea of those regions and networks.”  

Research over the last two decades has solidified the idea that addiction is a disease of the brain. But many people still believe that addiction is voluntary.

Some independent experts said the latest study was an unusually powerful demonstration of the brain’s role in substance use disorders. Among smokers who had strokes or other brain injuries, those with damage to a particular neural network experienced immediate relief from their cravings.

By Germaine, the science dude