Some of our neurons would suppress addiction reactions to drugs and alcohol. This is shown by a study that could lead to new treatments against addictions.
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute have taken the subject upside down: instead of looking for the elements that promote addictions to act against them, they have explored the brain to find what mechanisms can naturally come into play. to avoid them. And they managed to identify how certain neurons act together to suppress the signals that favor the relapse of those who are addicted to alcohol or drugs.
Funded in the United States by drug addiction institutions, their work has been published in NatureCommunications. The researchers looked at the behavior of nerve cells in the brain’s infralimbic cortex, an area thought to be responsible for impulse control.
The role of “missing signals”
Their experiments were done on male rats conditioned to become compulsive users of alcohol or cocaine. The work involved looking at what happens in the brain when the rats received environmental cues (a citrus smell in the case of this study) indicating that these substances were not available, signals called “omission cues”. “. “Our results demonstrate conclusively that certain neurons that respond together to omission cues also act together to suppress relapse,” says Nobuyoshi Suto of the Neuroscience Department at Scripps Research.
“Drugs designed to counter the brain processes leading to relapse have had limited success in patients, as have non-drug interventions such as exposure therapy that seeks to help individuals cope with addiction triggers, says Nobuyoshi Suto. “We thought that another strategy would be beneficial and we sought to explore what happens in the brain in the absence of triggers”.
New drug targets for relapse prevention
“We hope that further studies of these neural ensembles as well as the brain chemicals, genes and proteins unique to these ensembles can improve addiction management by identifying new drug targets for relapse prevention.” , adds the researcher.
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