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tathra writes:
MedicalXpress reports on a paper published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology about an antioxidant found to prevent and reverse the habit-forming effects of cocaine.
Cocaine promotes habitual behaviours and these can potentially be reversed with the use of an antioxidant, research at the University of Sydney has shown.
We show that exposure to cocaine speeds up habit learning and, importantly, this effect is not limited to drug use. We also discovered that these drug-induced habits can be prevented by taking an antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine (NAC)
This could lead to new treatments for people with drug addictions (or other bad habits), or to ways to prevent drugs from causing addiction in the first place. Which could be quite useful in medicine, if it could be applied to other habit-forming drugs such as morphine.
(Score: 1) by deterioration on Friday March 28 2014, @03:52PM
Synapses that fire together, wire together. Synapses that fire apart wire apart.
Where do you draw the line betweeen habituation and addiction? It's not reducible to a clear cut line for all scenarios.
(Score: 1) by deterioration on Friday March 28 2014, @03:55PM
Edit for clarification: All possible scenarios.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by umafuckitt on Friday March 28 2014, @04:33PM
Synapses that fire together, wire together. Synapses that fire apart wire apart.
Where do you draw the line betweeen habituation and addiction? It's not reducible to a clear cut line for all scenarios.
It may not always be clear cut (e.g. there's a debate on whether one can be genuinely addicted to video games) but generally speaking the distinction lies in the brain areas involved not by the mechanism by which synaptic plasticity happens. Addiction involves long-term changes to the reward pathways. Plasticity (which is what you're talking about) occurs in many phenomena in addition to addiction, such learning & memory, development of the nervous system, short-term memory, recovery from brain damage, etc, etc.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday March 28 2014, @05:34PM
I agree, it's not clear cut. There is considerable debate on that subject once you get past the highly over-simplified view presented to the layman.
However, where addiction treatment is concerned, it's not so important where the line as drawn as it that both sides of that line are somehow effectively addressed.
We know that in addition to the habituation, the reward pathways and receptor regulation are dirupted as well.