5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Flipping on your brain's addiction switch without drugs
When someone becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol, the brain's pleasure center gets hijacked, disrupting the normal functioning of its reward circuitry. Researchers investigating this addiction switch have now implicated a naturally occurring protein, a dose of which allowed them to get rats hooked with no drugs at all. "If we can understand how the brain's circuitry changes in association with drug abuse, it could potentially suggest ways to medically counteract the effects of dependency," said Scott Steffensen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University who co-authored the study.