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E-cigarettes popular among smokers with existing illnesses

In the U.S. more than 16 million people with smoking-related illnesses continue to use cigarettes. According to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, current and former smokers who suffer from disease are more likely to have reported using an e-cigarette, meaning these patients may see e-cigarettes as safer or less harmful than combustible cigarettes and a way to reduce the risks posed by traditional smoking . Use of electronic cigarettes has significantly increased in recent years. In 2010, only 2% of American adults had ever used an e-cigarette, but by 2014, that number had jumped to 12.6%. While most people see e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to traditional combustible smoking, many questions remain unanswered about their effects. Using data from the 2014 and 2015 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), investigators found that current smokers who also suffered from one or more medical conditions were more likely to have used an e-cigarette than ...
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How proteins find one another

As crucial drug targets, G-protein-coupled receptors are responsible for the effectiveness of nearly half of all medicines prescribed today. GPCRs are integral membrane proteins that control and modulate the processing of sensory and physiological stimuli, such as those relevant to our sight and taste, or those involved in controlling our heart rate. Arrestins play a key role in controlling the activity and signal transduction of GPCRs inside the cells of the body. "GPCRs are the target of a wide variety of drug-based treatments, which is why it is so important for us to understand their structure and function, and to fully understand how these membrane proteins interact at the molecular level. In order to develop better drugs with fewer side effects, this knowledge is necessary," explains Dr. Martha Sommer, who chairs the Arrestin Working Group at Charité's Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics. Some of the side effects that occur with certain medicines (such ...
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Brain scans could predict teens’ problem drug use before it starts

There's no perfect answer, but researchers report February 21 in  Nature Communications  that they've found a way to improve our predictions -- using brain scans that can tell, in a manner of speaking, who's bored by the promise of easy money, even when the kids themselves might not realize it. That conclusion grew out of a collaboration between Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology at Stanford, and Christian Büchel, a professor of medicine at Universitätsklinikum Hamburg Eppendorf. With support from the Stanford Neurosciences Institute's NeuroChoice program, which Knutson co-directs, the pair started sorting through an intriguing dataset covering, among other things, 144 European adolescents who scored high on a test of what's called novelty seeking -- roughly, the sorts of personality traits that might indicate a kid is at risk for drug or alcohol abuse. Novelty seeking in a brain scanner Novelty seeking isn't inherently bad, Knutson said. On a goo...
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Studies show that the cerebellum is crucial to understanding vulnerability to drug addiction

These studies are based on a series of works published over the last two years by the research group Addiction and Neuroplasticity at the Universitat Jaume I, directed by the lecturer of the Area of Psychobiology at ​​the UJI, which has had the collaboration of researchers from European, Mexican and North American universities. The most relevant, according to Miquel, is that the studies show that changes in the cerebellum "only occur in those subjects who appear to be especially vulnerable to the effect of drugs." For a long time, "we have verified that the cerebellum responds in a very potent way to the effect of cocaine, to the point of changing the mechanisms of plasticity," states Miquel, who is also coordinator of the master's degree in Research in Brain and Behaviour. Consequently, the cerebellum is a region of the brain relevant to understanding and designing future treatments for drug addiction. "There is progress in describing the neuronal cir...
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Sons of cocaine-using fathers have profound memory impairments

The study, which was led by Mathieu Wimmer, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher in the laboratory of R. Christopher Pierce, PhD, a professor of Neuroscience in Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, found evidence that the sons of fathers that ingested cocaine prior to conception struggle to make new memories. Their findings demonstrated that the sons -- but not the daughters -- of male rats that consumed cocaine for an extended period of time could not remember the location of items in their surroundings and had impaired synaptic plasticity in hippocampus , a brain region critical for learning and spatial navigation in humans and rodents. "These results suggest that the sons of male cocaine addicts may be at risk for learning deficits," said senior author, R. Christopher Pierce, PhD, a professor of Neuroscience in Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Pierce and his colleagues propose that...
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From heroin addiction to alcohol-related problems

The study includes data on nearly 9,000 patients with a heroin addiction who underwent substitution therapy in the Canton of Zurich between 1998 and 2014. They already consumed sustainably less heroin or cocaine -- and somewhat less alcohol -- from the beginning of the treatment. Moreover, the proportion of patients who consumed heroin frequently (at least five days per week) more than halved over the 17-year study period (from 14.4 to six percent), and the number of frequent cocaine consumers shrank from 8.5 to 4.9 percent. The results also demonstrate that the decrease in heroin consumption went hand in hand with an improved social situation for the patients. Nearly one in four frequently consumes alcohol "Alcohol consumption, on the other hand," explains Marcus Herdener , study head and chief physician at the University Psychiatric Hospital, "increased during the study period." Towards the end of the study, almost one in four patients (22.5%) frequently con...
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Aggression disorder linked to greater risk of substance abuse

In the study, published Feb. 28, 2017 in the  Journal of Clinical Psychiatry , Emil Coccaro, MD, and colleagues analyzed data from more than 9,200 subjects in the National Comorbidity Survey, a national survey of mental health in the United States. They found that as the severity of aggressive behavior increased, so did levels of daily and weekly substance use. The findings suggest that a history of frequent, aggressive behavior is a risk factor for later substance abuse, and effective treatment of aggression could delay or even prevent substance abuse in young people. IED affects as many as 16 million Americans, more than bipolar disorder and schizophrenia combined. It is often first diagnosed in adolescents, some of whom are as young as 11, years before substance abuse problems usually develop. IED runs in families and is thought to have a significant genetic component, although Coccaro said people tend to treat it as a social-behavioral issue instead of as a true neurobiolo...
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