Scientists at the Center for Bioinformatics of the Peking University in Beijing China used integrative meta-analysis to put together around 2,343 genetic evidence materials and create the most comprehensive genetic atlas of drug addiction to date. This atlas, which also shows five molecular pathways that underlie four different types of drug addiction, is available online with extensive annotations at the KARG website while the full-text research was published by PloS Computational Biology.

Several years of research on drug addiction gave the scientific community various albeit incomplete pictures of the said condition. Through the use of different technologies, researchers from different places and different times found a wide variety of biological process and genes underlying drug addiction. These individual evidences, however, are only pieces of the big addiction jigsaw puzzle and would make better sense if assembled in one big picture. Assembling this puzzle is a feat which scientists have been trying but have failed to accomplish until recently. The Peking University group’s work is the closest, and by far the most accurate, the research community have come to completing a complete genetic picture of drug addiction.

To come up with their atlas, researcher Liping Wei led his team to collect evidence from addiction-related literature published in the last 30 years, from which they were able to derive the 2,343 items they used in their project. The said items were genetic evidences that linked chromosomes and gene regions to drug addiction as showed by past genetic, proteomics, microarray, and single-gene strategy studies.

Using their assembled atlas of genetic evidence, the researches found 18 molecular pathways which are statistically superior in the genes associated with drug addiction. Among these 18 pathways, they also identified five that were common to four types drug addiction. These five pathways are also believed to share underlying response and reward mechanisms. The researchers also suggested that the five pathways can be further studied as new targets for effective drug addiction therapy.

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A new study of how certain brain systems are affected by drug abuse revealed a connection between two unlikely to be related brain signalling circuits: reward and stress. Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers found that the two have a functional link that affects brain activity in the extended amygdala, a brain region which previous studies have found to be associated with relapse. The researchers noted that this reward-stress link is a possible target for drug addiction and alcohol treatment methods, particularly in addressing the problem of relapse.

The current study is not the first to discover that drug and alcohol abuse do not only increase dopamine levels in the brain’s normal reward circuit but in the extended amygdala as well. This study, however, is the first to show how increased dopamine affects activity in the extended amygdala.

Through the use of an “in vitro brain slice system,” one of the researchers, Thomas Kash, found that dopamine increased the signalling of excitatory glutamate in the extended amygdala. More relevant to the study at hand, Kash discovered that dopamine required corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) signaling to produce the said effect. This is how the discovery of the link between reward (dopamine) and stress (CRF) first came about.

To support the above findings, another researcher in the person of William Nobis conducted an animal model experiment wherein he injected some mice with cocaine and then studied signaling using their brain slices. His in vivo experiment showed that the dopamine-CRF link was also present when studied inside an organism’s body as it was when studied outside, which was the setup of Kash’s experiment.

Both experiments, lead researcher Danny Winder explained, showed that the dopamine-CRF signaling in the extended amygdala may be one of the key factors that promote relapse. “If we can hone in on the mechanisms of this dopamine-CRF interaction, if we can identify the key population of CRF cells, then we could start to think of approaches to silence those cells,” he added.  Such therapy, Winder noted, would be very valuable to treating addiction and preventing relapse.

Winder explained that addiction therapies nowadays fall short of preventing relapse because they are focused on helping dependents survive the withdrawal phase. Findings of their study, he added, could be used to develop strategies that would effectively address stress-induced reinstatement of addictive behavior.

More updates on the latest developments in the drug and alcohol treatment research are available further in this website. Pacific Hills Treatment Center is a Christian-based rehab facility that offers holistic healing programs with emphasis on spirituality. Get the help you require today, call us at 866.536.7158.