Unlocking anatomy of addiction

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By Ann Geracimos

Everyone, it's fairly safe to say, knows someone who is addicted to something - but not everyone knows why. In scientific circles, addiction is regarded as a disease of the brain, with ongoing research showing great promise for treatment involving medications now under development. Despite scientists' efforts to change attitudes, addiction still often is considered a shameful matter, attributed to a lack of willpower or failure of character.

"We no longer use that term, 'addictive personality,' because it isn't really personality, but the interaction between a drug and a person," says Dr. Charles O'Brien, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and director of its treatment research center.

"For example, if 100 children are exposed to cocaine and they try it, 16 percent will become addicted, but the rest won't. The worst drug for producing addiction is nicotine. If 100 kids try smoking, about 32 percent will become addicted," he says.

"There is a basic neuroscience of addiction, which of all mental illnesses — including bipolar and schizophrenia — is better understood at the brain level," Dr. O'Brien explains, "partly because drugs are very specific and we have very good animal models."

Some 72 risk factors are critical to consider when speaking of addiction, Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and former head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told a Library of Congress audience earlier this year in a lecture titled "The New Science of Addiction and What it Means for Society.""

"So you have to think about a precise person when you think about an addicted individual," he said.

He spoke of his own efforts to quit smoking after 19 attempts, which he did 27 years ago, and how he can now "occasionally experience phenomenal cravings through activities associated with tobacco use. That craving causes brain activity."

The brain over time, he said, "is changed in fundamental and long-lasting ways persisting long after you stop using drugs." That change produces the condition that we call addiction, he noted, saying "effects persist not only in the brain but in cognitive learning functions."

Of all the various systems in the brain — aural, visual, etc. — the one Dr. O'Brien calls the reward system seemed designed early in evolution to motivate behavior.

"It turns out there are drugs that, by coincidence, activate the reward system very intensely — far more than by natural rewards from sex, food — or even winning at football," he explains. "If you study anything when young, you develop a better reward system. If you start at age 14, you are a more efficient smoker than at age 21, and the same for other addictions."