Tuesday, November 8, 2011

What if a Drug and Reversed Wiring of the Brain could Cure an Addiction Completely?

Humans become addictive to drugs for the main reason that it give pleasure. Practically all addictive drugs give a release of dopamine which governs motivation and reward centers of the brain. However, with each use of an addictive drug, a wire is threaded into the brain. That wire connects the drug to the various list of an individual's needs and wants. With each use, the connection grows stronger, until the drug substitutes for the list. The only desire in life would be the drug. The dopamine center is short of explaining everything about the use of addictive drugs. Researchers are turning to a new brain chemical called orexin.
Researchers in the University of California are looking to the brain chemical orexin to see how it can trigger arousal and pleasure within brain circuitry. When using an experiment done with rats, giving a dose of cocaine to rats would increase the physical activity, and thus shows the increase in expression of the dependency for the drug. This is called the sensitization to the drug. But, the sensitization won't occur if the same rat given cocaine, was also given a chemical blocking the flow of orexin. This showed that blocking the flow of orexin, also caused the inability of the brain to rewire from the cocaine. Questions came from this experiment such as, What if people would still be able to take pleasurable drugs without become addictive to them? However, the chemicals to block orexin just prevent the rewiring of the brain, they do not reverse it. The scientists are aimed at how to restore connections of the brain that were previously there before drug addiction occurred. They started to look at how memory is formed within the brain. The research team in the University of California acknowledged that one way memory is form is from the slow and steady pulse to the brain in order for the circuitry to be altered. The team created a protein fragment that could change the rate of firing, thus not causing circuitry, hence, no memory was formed. The protein was given to the mice that were dosed with amphetamine and found the mice responded to the amphetamine as though they first received it. This raised the motivation within the researchers that reversed wiring in the brain could occur.
Medications on blocking orexin might be available soon according the the researchers. However, wire reversal therapy is much longer in the wait and more up to discussion.
I want your opinion to this idea of reversed rewiring of the brain, as though the drug never took an effect. Although, finding a medication that could stop addiction is one advancement, what if the wiring could be placed in reversed, as though a drug addiction never even happened?

4 comments:

  1. I understand that a drug can block a nerve pathway but I do not get how simply taking a drug could rewire our nerves. If you found an article about this it would be greatly appreciated if you put up the link.

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  2. The drug does not rewire the nerves, it prevents the rewiring from occuring by blocking certain chemicals. The process of rewiring the brain from the drug addiction is still in research. However, something similar to this is cognitive therapy which is used often to help "mend" the mind from the addiction.
    http://www.drugrehabsupport.com/cognitive-treatment-of-drug-addiction.html
    This site gives another description of the therapies involved.
    http://www.addiction-alternative.com/adcoc.asp

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  3. Wouldn't having the opportunity to take the drugs, but not actually have it grow into an addiction to the level of the brain rewiring to become dependent of the drug, cause people to become more prone to actually taking the drugs?

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  4. I think it would be good to be able to do this not for people doing cocain neccessarily but for people who are given prescribed drugs that can become addictive and hard to ween off of. Also what exactly is orexins role in arousal and pleasure because it is still thought that dopamine is the main Neurotransmitter released whenever we are happy about something. And does orexin have any other function in the brain because I know dopamine has a lot of functions as a neurotransmitter. Also, with memory I think that memory must pass through the hippocampus in order to be stored long term (I might be wrong) but maybe scientists could find a way to block the memory from passing through the hippocampus and being stored

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