(no subject)

[andrewducker]

Reposted, as I was linking to a friends-only post (d'oh!)

Some interesting pictures of brains:

The brightly colored areas in these images mark the nucleus accumbens, the brain's reward center. Red indicates a high number of receptors for dopamine, a brain chemical that transmits sensations of pleasure; yellow and green indicate fewer receptors. People short on dopamine receptors have difficulty feeling joy. Many scientists have been surprised by recent studies revealing that the biochemistry of classic addictions, such as alcoholism and drug abuse, is strikingly similar to that of compulsive activities, including gambling and overeating.

- Popular Science

The pictures seem to indicate that people get higher levels of cravings to try and compensate for the lower levels of dopamine receptors.

Again - complex behaviour (what people do to satisfy their craving) caused by a simple basic cause (sensitivity to dopamine). Dopamine sensitivity is almost certainly going to be determined genetically, alcoholism almost certainly isn't.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The pictures seem to indicate that people get higher levels of cravings to try and compensate for the lower levels of dopamine receptors.

Perhaps. Alternately, these images could equally well indicate that overloading various reward centers for too long can temporarily or permanently deactivate dopamine receptors, thus creating the sort of self-reinforcing cycle of compulsion that is so very common. There is obviously something important going on here, but w/o significantly more data, I'm not at all convinced which way the causality goes.

[alycekat.livejournal.com]

What a cool post! Thank you.

A decade or a bit more ago, when I was at Cal & doing a major heavy on biological psych, I did a term paper on the current state of the research on alcoholism - genetic or not? There was a lot of data to suggest that something about that behavior pattern was rooted in the genes.

Also, there was a bit of research on kids, 7 yr old sons of alcoholic fathers, I think it was. Kids who had reportedly never had a drink. They already had abnormal brain wave patterns, with the oddities localized to one part of the EEG consistently. Just one study on that, so far as I was able to find out. (This study was done to try to answer the causality question - was ETOH consupmtion causing the odd brain waves in the fathers, or could they have been present before hand.)

The results of all the studies taken together strongly suggested that at least some alcoholics were drinking to "self-medicate" for a preexisting disorder, of some kind.

I wonder if the whole issue of dopamine will end up being a significant part of what's going on there? There is an awful lot of correlational data to suggest some component of what goes into being an alcoholic is genetically determined, for a lot of folks with that problem. It would be great if they could find out what the basic biological "glitch" is, and then maybe they could treat it directly, rather than these people trying to find various other ways to compensate.

I do disability evaluation, and if you subtracted all the cases on my desk that result from the outcome addictions of one kind or another (cirrhosis of the liver, auto accidents due to intoxication, strokes while on coke/speed - all the effects of drugs as well as alcohol) I'd have only about 25-30% of my current case load. Seriously, that much of the under age 65 disability case load in CA is drug & alcohol related!

It would be really nice to find out why people do this to themselves (and to the rest of us). Some of it I grant you is probably just human stupidity. But it cant all be that simple, surely.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Dopamine sensitivity is almost certainly going to be determined genetically, alcoholism almost certainly isn't

Or, equally, it could be determined by what you have done to your brain chemically in the past. What you have done could ahve been infulenced by your genetics. It all goes round, and is hard to tell.

The 'sway' test is a good one though in connection with alcohol - look it up.

Alcohol problems are not a classical addiction, despite the propaganda trying to make a square peg fit a round hole, they do NOT fit that pattern.

If you are interested do the reading (as i have, to an extent), then you'll probably come to this conclusion. I suspect that the fact that alcohol is a siginficant source of calories, means that it taps other weirder pathways in addition to what it usually studied. Look at people's behaviour and problems with food and you begin to see what I mean and why it's so complex.