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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8984&print=trueCocaine-triggered brain changes reversed in rodents
17:21 11 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Prashant Nair
A strategy to reverse some of the brain changes triggered by cocaine, which lead to addiction, may have been uncovered by Swiss scientists. The findings constitute the first step in the development of a drug to reverse cocaine-driven rewiring in the brain, the researchers claim.
Cocaine triggers changes in the brain that lead to the development of drug sensitisation – a learning-associated process that underlies addiction. Like many addictive drugs, cocaine ups the concentration of the brain chemical dopamine, causing neurons that respond to dopamine to fire.
This process reorganises the brain circuitry and hardwires the addiction by disrupting the normal connections between two different brain regions. Those areas are the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex – associated with learning and memory – and the ventral tegmental area, involved with feelings of pleasure, reward and behavioural motivation (see "Cocaine use prevents adaptive behaviour"). But how cocaine drives this change in dopamine neurons was unclear until recently.
Switch blocker
Now, Christian Luescher and Camilla Bellone at the University of Geneva, Switzerland have shown that cocaine causes a switch in the components, or subunits, which make up the receptors on the surface of neurons in the ventral tegmental area, the brain’s "pleasure centre". This leads to excitatory wiring – or strong stimulation of these cells. Brain slices from mice given cocaine, showed the receptors in their brains had undergone a subunit switch.
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