Opioid Addiction Switch

Understanding addiction is no simple matter, especially when it comes to how the use of certain substances lead to the disease rearing up and the changes that occur in the brain from continued use. Today, in the United States, one of the driving forces of the majority of addiction studies involves opioid narcotics used to treat pain. The state of the Union with regard to prescription painkiller abuse, and the subsequent rise of heroin use use, has prompted a number of researchers to tackle the opioid epidemic.

Advances in research give scientists a better understanding of how opioids impact the brain—culminating in the rise of addiction—placing them in a better position to develop new and more effective medication for both preventing and treating opioid addiction. Such therapies are desperately needed in the ongoing fight to curb the insidious opioid epidemic we find ourselves with—the most deadly scourge in American history.

New research is probing the mind to find out how opioid narcotics alter the brain, leading to a cycle of addiction, ScienceDaily reports. Researchers at Western University found that the use of opioid narcotics impacts pathways in the brain that are linked to the creation of associative memory. The process observed could result in the development of drugs that can “prevent or reverse the effect of opiate exposure and addiction.”

The abnormalities occur on two levels:

• Anatomically: Connections Between Neurons
• Molecularly: How molecules Affect Such Connections

The findings of the study were presented at the 10th Annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, in Toronto, Canada. Study lead researcher, Dr. Steven Laviolette, says:

"Developing more effective opiate addiction treatments will require a change in the way we view the effects of opiates on the brain. Instead of addiction being a chronic, permanent disease, recent evidence is showing that addiction is controlled by molecular switching mechanisms in the brain, that can be turned on or off with the right interventions.”