Over the last ten years, prescriptions for strong opioid medications for non-cancer pain have doubled and public health experts say the rise is almost entirely due to rocketing levels of abuse and addiction. Led by Dr G. Caleb Alexander of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the new study is documented in the journal […]
Scientists at Duke University Medical Center and the University of Melbourne have found that addictive drugs appear to hijack the same nerve cells and connections in the brain that serve a powerful, ancient instinct: our appetite for salt. In the new study, appearing in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team demonstrate […]
According to researcher Hitoshi Morikawa, repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in the brain, providing further evidence toward an emerging scientific consensus that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder. “Drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better,” contends Morikawa, from The University of Texas at […]
