Submitted by giuliomagnifico t3_10yyddf in science
But this could be a trailhead for finding a treatment.
It could be. If further studies prove that the activation causes the behavior. On the other hand, if the behavior causes the activation or the brain region activation and the drug-seeking-behavior are both caused by some third, unmeasured variable, then this has no treatment value.
As I said, correlations are valuable. Mis-representing them is not.
If it's any part of the reward system it could be a really good target.
The nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex (the structures identified in this study) have been shown to be involved in reward and drug addiction for decades, but we still don't have treatments.
I am writing my thesis on this exact topic currently and I wanted to say this exact thing. We roughly know that dopamine is released in these areas as a response to reward/reward predicting stimuli and that dopamine is also involved in a lot of regulatory activity. We know it affects cordination, motivation, emotion regulation etc etc. Knowing this and then thinking about what is the best way to fix a dopamine misfunction (If there is one?, May not be the case) are two seperate things ESPECIALLY, when this system responds to SOOO many different forms of stimuli. Currently I would say a holistic approach (Lifestyle changes, therapy, maybe a medicinal treatment aswell (ie. Methylphenidate (Ritalin) seem to be potential approaches to look at). Deciding what is the best and why and for who is really hard
Exactly! THAT was the first thing that came to mind when I read this post! This discovery could be a really big deal for addicts one day. Exciting research if you ask me!
I would love to participate in one of these studies
This one is conducted in mice.
Are they Wall Street mice in little business suits sniffing cocaine and yelling "Sell! Sell!" Into their phones?
My god I’m sorry.
But handjob study to see if they could induce neuropathic addiction response.
My brain instantly went there for some reason. It’s been a long week.
There is no such word as "identficating". The word you are looking for is "identifying".
And let me just say that this is a big pet peeve of mine. That is when people replace -ing suffix in participle verbs with -cating which does not exist and just sounds ignorant.
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What is "identificating"? shouldn't it be identifying?
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ctorg t1_j80chmk wrote
Yeah "activated during" is very far from "responsible for." This is a correlational finding - which is valuable, but should not be communicated as having a particular direction or causality.
Edit: the study itself uses the phrase "involved in"