Have we found the treatment for cocaine addiction?

Revealed - How cocaine controls brain function!

Drugs like cocaine are known to cause serious health issues. Cocaine addiction is not only known to increase suicidal tendencies in addicts but also have a negative effect on their heart health. Researchers across the world are trying to figure out ways to treat addiction and scientists at the Washington State University might have just cracked this code. These researchers of Washington State University have found a mechanism in the brain that facilitates the pathologically powerful role of memory in drug addiction. (Read: Youth addicted to cocaine at risk of sudden death)

Their discovery opens a new area of research for targeted therapy that would alter or disable the mechanism and make drug addiction less compulsive. Researchers explained that turning off the mechanism diminishes emotional impact and weight of the memory that drives people impulsive behind drug addiction. They further mentioned that drug use creates memories so powerful that they hijack the system and turn physiology into pathology. (Read: Cocaine users at high risk of suicide)

It was observed that rats who were given cocaine in a drug cage, where they associate the experience with that particular place, would draw memories of previous experiences there, re-consolidate them with new information and in effect reinforce the memory. Megan Slaker, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience said that when they manipulated the rats and removed the nets from the prefrontal cortex, they analysed that animals had poorer memories. (Read: Cocaine addiction to be conquered soon?)

Barbara Sorg, a professor of neuroscience at Washington State University, Vancouver, noted that the procedure probably did not erase the drug memory but blunted its emotional power. The findings opened the possibility of developing a way to target, for example, a protein of the perineuronal nets, to counteract cocaine's influence over memories. (Read: Heart complications in cocaine users go undetected)

The research is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

With inputs from ANI

Image source: Getty Images

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