The next time a friend says he’s addicted to bacon, you should know he probably isn’t joking. The brains of rats fed only on junk food—like bacon, Ho Hos, cheesecake, and sausage—look similar to the brains of heroin-addicted rats, according to new a study. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food [Science News]. The findings suggest that drug addiction and overeating have similar biological mechanisms, according to the scientists from the Scripps Research Institute. The work is not yet published, but was presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting.
The rats fed on junk food displayed a hallmark of addiction. After just five days on the junk food diet, rats showed “profound reductions” in the sensitivity of their brains’ pleasure centers, suggesting that the animals quickly became habituated to the food. As a result, the rats ate more food to get the same amount of pleasure. Just as heroin addicts require more and more of the drug to feel good, rats needed more and more of the junk food [Science News]. To test the depths of the rats addiction, researchers shocked rats every time they ate junk food. Rats that had not previously binged on Ho Hos quickly stopped eating the high-fat foods. However, the fat rats kept eating junk food even though they knew the shock was coming. Now that’s an addiction.
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Image: flickr / asplosh
Almost one-third of the cocaine seized in the United States is tainted with the livestock deworming medication levamisole, according to Drug Enforcement Administration documents the Associated Press received.
Levamisole, which can give users a more intense high, weakens the immune system, and has killed at least three people and sickened 100 in Canada and the United States. What’s more, physicians remain largely unaware of the tainted drugs, leaving them helpless to diagnose or treat those affected. “I would think it would be fair to say the vast majority of doctors in the United States have no idea this is going on,” said Eric Lavonas, assistant director of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver, where as much as half of the cocaine is believed to contain levamisole. “You can’t diagnose a disease you’ve never heard of” [Associated Press].
Because of the particular distribution mechanism of cocaine, it may be difficult to get the warning out to people at risk. “It’s not like you can put [a warning] on the bottle” [Associated Press], says Lavonas.
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Image: iStockphoto
Researchers have found a way to reduce the ill-effects of heroin addiction and to generally keep the addicts out of trouble, but there’s a catch: The solution is to give the addicts injections of a pure form of pharmaceutical heroin twice a day. In a fascinating new study, Canadian researchers found that addicts who received the prescription heroin were more likely to stay in treatment than those given methadone, the commonly prescribed opioid that manages heroin cravings without providing the high. Experts say lengthy treatment is often needed to treat other diseases as well as provide counseling to reverse criminal behavior and otherwise stabilize addicts’ lives and improve the chances that they will stop using heroin [The Wall Street Journal].
The study enrolled 226 heroin addicts who had been using the drug for at least five years, and who had failed to stick with a methadone-treatment program at least once. Half the subjects came to the clinic to receive shots of diacetylmorphine—pure heroin—while the other half received standard methadone treatment. After one year, 88% of those in the diacetylmorphine group were still in treatment, compared with 54% in the methadone group [Los Angeles Times]. The test subjects who received heroin were also more likely to reduce their criminal behavior and their drug use outside the clinic, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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The Chinese government has banned the controversial use of electroconvulsive therapy, or shock therapy, to treat the controversial diagnosis of “Internet addiction.” With an estimated 300 million Internet users, China has been grappling with how to keep avid Web surfers from spending their whole lives online, and various clinics have sprung up, offering parents the chance to “cure” their children of the uncontrollable urge to blog or play online games [Telegraph]. But a recent scandal involving a psychiatric hospital in Shandong province that was using a “brain-waking” treatment of electric shocks has rallied public opinion against such clinics.
China’s Ministry of Health has now posted a notice on its Web site stating that there is no evidence that electric shock therapy is an effective treatment for Internet addiction. A hospital spokeswoman last week said “sensationalized” media reports had already led it to cease the shock treatment. The shocks were meant to cause subjects to associate a negative result with Internet use, according to the hospital [ComputerWorld]. People who were subjected to the treatment report that they were forced to apologize for and repudiate their Internet-using ways while receiving the shocks, which were also used as punishment for uncooperative behavior. In what might be an indication of the clinic’s effectiveness, its practices came to light when former patients went online to complain [The Wall Street Journal].
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Rats in laboratory tests learned to gamble based on a system of punishments and rewards, strategizing like human gamblers. And when researchers tweaked the animals’ brain chemistry to mimic that of humans with a gambling addiction, the mice began taking risks like pathological gamblers, according to a study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
To create this animal model of gambling addiction, researchers created a system in which options that could bring greater rewards also could yield stronger punishment. In this case, however, instead of gambling for money, the rats aimed to get as many sugar pellets as possible. The rodents were placed in specially built boxes whose walls incorporated four “response holes.” Each opening was associated with a possibility of earning treats – from one up to four, depending on the aperture chosen. When an animal poked its snout into a hole, the movement would break an infra-red light across the opening, signaling a computer with a “probabilistic” reward-punishment schedule to assign a pellet win or a “timeout” loss. Playing against the clock, the rats had only 30 minutes to accumulate as many sugar pellets as they could [The Canadian Press].
The rats quickly caught on that by choosing the openings that offered the greatest number of pellets, they also risked the longest time-outs during which they could not play the game. The test was based on an evaluation for decision-making in humans called the Iowa Gambling Test. In that game, there are some “bad” decks of cards that offer high rewards and punishments, and other “good” decks that offer lesser rewards and punishments.
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Inserting a “pacemaker” into the brain to emit regular pulses of electricity and quell disordered neural activity may sound like a therapy of last resort, but if current experiments show beneficial results the brain surgery may one day be commonplace. But some scientists are cautioning that research on so-called deep brain stimulation may be pressing ahead too quickly, and warn that long-term effects of the surgery are not yet clear.
A growing number of psychiatric researchers are testing the method’s effectiveness on a host of psychiatric disorders. Until recently, deep brain stimulation was approved in the U.S. only to treat certain movement disorders, primarily those of Parkinson’s disease, for which it diminishes tremors and rigidity and improves mobility. To date, more than 60,000 patients worldwide have had the devices implanted [Los Angeles Times]. But now large clinical trials are in the works that will test the use of deep brain stimulation for obsessive compulsive disorder, epilepsy, and depression. Smaller experiments are beginning to assess the therapy’s effectiveness on a wide range of disorders including anorexia, drug addiction, obesity, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer’s.
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Some kids lie and steal to get an opportunity to play a thrilling video game, while others say they have to spend an ever increasing amount of time playing games to get the same level of enjoyment, and feel irritable when they can’t play. All these behaviors, recorded in a new survey of young gamers, are actually symptoms of addiction to video games, psychologist Douglas Gentile argues. “I think we’re at the same place now with video gaming as we were with alcoholism 40 years ago,” said Gentile, noting that decades of research finally showed that alcoholism is a disease [HealthDay News].
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, surveyed more than 1,000 American kids ranging in age from 8 to 18. Gentile used a questionnaire adapted from a set of questions used to diagnose compulsive gambling in adults, and found that almost one in ten respondents showed signs of “pathological gaming,” meaning that they exhibited at least six of the 11 criteria of addiction. Gentile claims that he started his research with doubts about the possibility of addiction. “I thought this was parental histrionics — that kids are playing a lot and parents don’t understand the motivation, so they label it an addiction,” he said. “It turns out that I was wrong” [Washington Post].
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A neuroscientist whose car was firebombed by violent animal rights activists has decided to fight back, at least in the court of public opinion. The UCLA professor, David Jentsch, has formed a group called UCLA Pro-Test, and is organizing a rally in support of animal testing. “People always say: ‘Don’t respond. If you respond, that will give [the attackers] credibility,’” Jentsch, 37, said in a recent interview in his UCLA office. “But being silent wasn’t making us feel safer. And it’s a moot point if they are coming to burn your car anyway, whether you give them credibility or not” [Los Angeles Times].
UCLA Pro-Test, named after a similar group in the United Kingdom, wants to show its support for animal research that is conducted in a humane and regulated way. Jentsch studies schizophrenia and drug addiction, and works on both rodents and vervet monkeys.
The Animal Liberation Brigade took credit for bombing Jentsch’s Volvo as it sat in his driveway in the early morning hours of March 7. The activist group wrote in an Internet posting: “The things you and others like you do to feeling, sentient monkeys is so cruel and disgusting we can’t believe anyone would be able to live with themselves…. David, here’s a message just for you, we will come for you when you least expect it and do a lot more damage than to your property” [Los Angeles Times].
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Lab rats who were exposed to alcohol while in the womb had a skewed sense of taste and showed a marked preference for ethanol as young rats, researchers say. The findings may shed new light on why human studies have previously linked fetal alcohol exposure to increased alcohol abuse later in life, and to a lower age at which a person first starts drinking alcohol [New Scientist].
The taste of alcohol has both sweet and bitter components, and study coauthor Steven Youngentob wondered whether prenatal exposure could affect how rats respond to those elements. He gave young rats a choice between ethanol, sweet water flavored with sugar, and bitter water flavored with quinine. Those rats whose mothers had consumed alcohol while they were pregnant preferred ethanol and the bitter water. By contrast, rats who were not exposed to alcohol tended to plump for the sweeter alternative [Telegraph].
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To a gambler’s brain, a near miss provides almost the same high as a win, according to a new study that helps explain the allure of slot machines and the difficulty that some gamblers have in walking away. “The near-miss is quite a paradoxical event,” [researcher Luke] Clark says. Gamblers who almost win put “their head down in their hands — they can’t believe it. And then the next thing they do is place another bet” [Science News].
In the small study, published in Neuron [subscription required], researchers had 15 volunteers play a slot machine while their brain activity was recorded with fMRI scans. When the researchers compared the scans, they found that near misses drew more blood to reward regions such as the insula and the ventral striatum than full misses did [ScienceNOW Daily News]. These areas are also activated by rewards like chocolate and cocaine; when the near misses partially activated the so-called reward pathway, it released pleasant doses of the brain chemical dopamine.
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It doesn’t matter if they only smoke when the kids are out of the house, or when they’re alone in the car, or even if they only smoke outside; researchers still warn that toxic chemicals exhaled by cigarette smokers cling to their clothes and hair, and linger in upholstery, curtains, and carpets. In a new study, researchers say the public is well aware of the health effects of second-hand smoke, when nonsmokers are directly exposed to the cigarette smoke of others, but hasn’t yet caught on to the danger of what they call “third-hand smoke.” Lead author Jonathan Winickoff explains that third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, he said, or in a hotel room where people were smoking. “Your nose isn’t lying,” he said. “The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away’” [The New York Times].
The researchers say that there is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke, and note that children are particularly susceptible to ill-effects from the toxic residue left behind long after a cigarette has been stubbed out. Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid; toluene, found in paint thinners; arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide; and even polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic [The New York Times].
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Gay young adults who were rejected by their families when they came out as teenagers are much more likely to attempt suicide, have unprotected sex, and have problems with drug use and depression, according to a new study. The findings are based on surveys of 224 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender adults in California who ranged in age from 21 to 25. Gay Latinos were most likely to experience a poor reception from their parents, and had the highest rates of risk factors for HIV and mental health problems, according to the research [Scientific American].
The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics [subscription required], don’t prove that a family’s negative reaction to a child’s sexuality directly causes problems later in life. But it’s clear that “there’s a connection between how families treat gay and lesbian children and their mental and physical health” [HealthDay News] said social worker Caitlin Ryan, the study’s lead author. She found that teenagers who were rejected by their families were eight times as likely to attempt suicide, six times as likely to report serious depression, and three times as likely to have unprotected sex and use drugs.
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When a honeybee is given a dose of cocaine, it gets overexcited about poor-quality food and performs overenthusiastic dances to communicate with its hivemates, according to an odd new study that got bees hooked on drugs. The research found similarities between honey bees and humans, in that they are both are driven by rewards and both have their judgment altered by cocaine. “This is the first time that it’s been shown that cocaine has been rewarding to an insect” [Reuters], says study coauthor Andrew Barron.
After a honeybee has been out foraging for food, it returns to the hive and tells the other bees what it found by means of a “waggle dance” that describes the location and quality of the food source. But after dabbing low doses of cocaine on the bees’ backs before they went out, the researchers observed that when they returned they were more likely to dance for their nest mates, and performed particularly vigorous routines explaining where the food was located [The Guardian]. They performed these exuberant dances even when the food source that the researchers provided was a weak sugar water solution that didn’t merit the hive’s attention.
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An experimental drug has shown promise in preventing emphysema in mice exposed to cigarette smoke, giving researchers new hope that they’ll soon find a way to combat one of the most stubborn, untreatable, and common killers of humans. Even though the study focuses on emphysema in mice, the researchers suggest the drug could work in people by delaying or preventing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which encompasses emphysema and chronic bronchitis and is the fourth most common cause of death in the United States [Science News].
The drug, called CDDO-imidazole, or CDDO-Im, works by activating a gene called Nrf2, explains study coauthor Shyam Biswal. In prior research, Biswal and colleagues found that Nrf2 works as a “master gene,” turning on genes involved in protecting the lungs from pollution and cigarette smoke. “The Nrf2 pathway is the major antioxidant and detoxifying response in the lungs. Therapies targeting this pathway need to be developed and tested in patients,” said Biswal [Reuters].
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If you could take a pill to boost your concentration and mental stamina, would you do it? Around the country, thousands of college students are already answering “yes” to that question and are using prescription medications like Ritalin as study aids, and researchers say the demand for such “smart pills” is likely to grow. Now, in a new essay, a group of neuroscientists and bioethicists is arguing that society shouldn’t frown on such practices; instead the authors assert that “we should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,” and that doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night’s sleep [Chronicle of Higher Education].
Stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall are prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and are commonly used by people without a prescription to help them focus their attention, while a narcolepsy drug called Provigil is sometimes used by people trying to keep their brains alert and awake. The new essay cited a recent survey that found nearly 7 percent of students in U.S. universities have used prescription stimulants, and on some campuses, as many as a quarter of students have used the drugs for non-therapeutic purposes. “It’s a felony, but it’s being done,” [coauthor Martha] Farah said [Reuters].
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