A cocaine addict in recovery walks past a bar where they used to buy drugs, and within hours they are using again. This research aims to understand why that happens—and how to stop it. Drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disorder that devastates individuals, families, and society through crime and healthcare costs. The core puzzle is why casual drug use can spiral into compulsive, uncontrollable seeking, and why addicts relapse so easily even after long periods of abstinence. The researchers will test whether this loss of control stems from a breakdown in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for inhibiting bad habits. They will also investigate how drug-associated cues—places, people, objects—reactivate drug memories, and whether disrupting the "reconsolidation" process that updates those memories could weaken their power. If successful, this work could lead to new neuropharmacological treatments that help addicts maintain abstinence and prevent relapse. That would directly reduce the human and social toll of addiction. The research is primarily fundamental science—building a psychological and neural explanation of compulsive drug seeking—but it targets a clear long-term goal: better therapies for a disorder that currently has few effective options.
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Drug addiction is a major form of neuropsychiatric disorder that also places an enormous burden on society through its repercussions on crime-rate and health-care. As highlighted in the 2005 Technology Foresight project, ?Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs? (http://www.foresight.gov.uk/Brain_Science_Addiction_and_Drugs/index.html), there is a major need to develop new treatments for drug addiction. This requires a much better psychological and neural explanation, of the processes by which casual, or intermittent, drug use can progress to a compulsive drug seeking habit such that drug addiction is manifested clinically as a chronic-relapsing disorder with devastating consequences for individuals, their families and the societies in which they live. In the proposed research, we aim to model the transition from voluntary drug seeking through loss of control over this behaviour so that it becomes ultimately compulsive and persistent. We will investigate the neural basis of this transition, especially testing the hypothesis that it involves a loss of control by the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in ?executive function? that include inhibitory processes that would, for example, normally prevent the establishment of maladaptive habits, such as compulsive drug taking. Abstinence in human addicts is especially difficult to maintain and relapse, often triggered by drug-associated stimuli in the environment, is a characteristic of drug addiction. We now know that activation of drug memories by exposure to drug-associated stimuli and environments makes them vulnerable to disruption, since they undergo a process of ?reconsolidation? during which the memories are updated and re-engage neural mechanisms of plasticity. Thus we will study the molecular and neurochemical basis of drug memories and then investigate whether it is possible to diminish or block the pervasive impact of these memories on drug addiction and relapse. A longer term goal, therefore, is the development of novel neuropharmacological approaches to the treatment of drug addiction that will promote abstinence and prevent relapse in individuals trying to relinquish their compulsive, drug seeking habits.
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