Studies explore origins of addiction, treaments

According to the World Health Organization, 15.3 million people worldwide suffer from drug use disorders. A variety of brain areas and processes play a role in addictive behaviors, complicating treatment and costing millions of dollars and lives each year. Today's studies contribute to an understanding of how compulsive disorders like addiction develop and provide new insight into methods to treat addictive behaviors .

The new findings show that:

• Magnetic stimulation of the brain helps some people decrease their smoking, and even quit altogether for up to six months after treatment
• Stimulating an area of the brain associated with drug reward, the subthalamic nucleus, reduces rats' motivation to take heroin
• Chronic pain leads rats already exposed to drugs to take more and higher doses of heroin, suggesting that people with addiction are more susceptible to overdose when in chronic pain

Other recent findings discussed show that:

• Drug abuse stresses the brain, and the resulting dysregulation of systems involved in the stress response could contribute to negative feelings that trigger increased drug taking and addiction
• Research suggests an area of the brain known as the insula may be overactive in people with gambling problems. People with damage to this area were less prone to the motivations of gamblers, providing a clue to identify areas of the brain that are linked to gambling addiction
• Pathological gamblers may love a cash payout, but care less about other types of rewards, such as sex or food. Researchers found pathological gamblers showed decreased activity in reward-sensitive brain areas when money wasn't involved

"Non-drug interventions would be an enormous step forward in drug abuse treatment, which currently relies on replacing one drug with another and has an extremely high rate of relapse," said press conference moderator Barry Everitt of the University of Cambridge, an expert in drug abuse research. "Today's exciting results give us new ways of understanding why compulsive conditions such as drug abuse and pathological gambling might arise, and give us targets to explore for non-drug treatment, which would help us treat a population suffering from addiction."