Novel study offers new targets for cocaine addiction

Washington, May 26 (ANI): When given a psychological test, parts of the brain involved in monitoring behaviours and emotions showed different levels of activity in cocaine users relative to non-drug users, a new study has found.

This was when both groups perform equally well on a psychological test.

The study's results - from a brain-imaging study conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and published online the week of May 25, 2009, by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - suggest that such impairments may underlie addictive vulnerability, and that treatments aimed at improving these functions could help addicted individuals resist drugs.

"Many studies have found decreased brain activity in drug-addicted individuals relative to healthy control subjects during psychological tests," said lead author Rita Goldstein, a psychologist at Brookhaven Lab.

"But it's never been clear if these differences were due to varying levels of interest or ability between the two groups. This is the first study to look at two groups matched for performance and interest - and we still see dramatic differences in the brain regions that play a very significant role in the ability to monitor behavior and regulate emotion, which are both important to resisting drug use.

"Whether these brain differences are an underlying cause or a consequence of addiction, the brain regions involved should be considered targets for new kinds of treatments aimed at improving function and self-regulatory control," Goldstein said.

To reach the conclusion, researchers studied 17 active cocaine users and 17 demographically matched healthy control subjects. Both groups were trained to push one of four colored buttons corresponding to the color of type used to present words that were either related to drug use (e.g., crack, addict) or neutral household terms. Subjects were given monetary rewards for fast, accurate performance - up to 50 cents for each correct answer on some tests, for a maximum of 75 dollars.

After training, both groups performed equally well on this same test while lying in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, with performance improving when they knew they'd be earning the highest monetary reward. During the tests, the scientists used functional MRI (fMRI) to indirectly measure the amount of oxygen being used by specific regions of the brain, as an indicator of brain activity in those regions.

There were three main differences between the cocaine-addicted subjects and the healthy controls - the cocaine users had reduced activity in a portion of the anterior cingulate cortex that usually becomes more active (compared to a passive baseline) when monitoring behavior.

Second difference was that the cocaine users also had reduced activity in another part of the anterior cingulate cortex that usually becomes less active (compared to a passive baseline) when someone is successfully suppressing emotional feelings.

Last one was that the functions within the behavior-monitoring and emotion-monitoring brain regions were interconnected in the healthy control subjects but not in the addicted individuals.

"When you really have to suppress a powerful negative emotion, like sadness, anxiety or drug craving, activity in this brain region is supposed to decrease, possibly to tune out the background 'noise' of these emotions so you can focus on the task at hand," Goldstein said.

"Our results show that activity in this region indeed went down in the drug-using group, suggesting they were actively trying to suppress craving. Indeed subjects who reported the highest levels of task-induced craving were the least able to suppress activity in this particular brain region.

"This could be because these drug users were still being distracted by background 'noise' stimuli, like memories of having taken drugs or anticipation of further use," Goldstein said. (ANI)