Hope For Stopping Alcoholism May Be Upon Science

If you, or someone you know had been struggling with alcoholism, then there might be hope for you yet. In a new study in animal models, it seems that the urge for compulsive drinking can be shut down. The research led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, TSRI Assistant Professor Olivier George said, "We can completely reverse alcohol dependence by targeting a network of neurons."

The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience, but it was already built on previous studies that showed frequent alcohol use can activate specific groups of neurons -- the more a person drinks, the more they will be able to reinforce activation in a "circuit" which drives further alcohol use and addiction, as if the brain carves a path particularly leading to alcohol as a reward.

The new study, on the other hand, had the investigators looking for a way to influence the select neurons from the circuits to cut the need for alcohol consumption. In both rats and humans, such circuits make up only about five percent of the neurons in the central amygdala of the brain. TSRI Research Associate Giordano de Guglielmo, who spearheaded the experiment noted that the rats have given them a new window as to how these circuits form in human brains, where alcohol-linked neurons are harder to identify without using protein labels.

When experimenting on rats, Science Daily noted that the researchers injected them with a compound that specifically inactivated only alcohol-linked neurons, and George said that he was surprised at how the rates completely ceased their compulsive alcohol drinking while they were being monitored. "We've never seen an effect that strong that has lasted for several weeks, I wasn't sure if I believed it."

For each time that the rats were experimented on, they ceased their compulsive drinking, like they forgot that they were alcohol dependent. However, not the same can be said about their motivation to drink sugar water, which indicates that the scientists were able to successfully target only alcohol-activated neurons.

As for humans, this research shed some light on the differences in the brain between casual binge drinking and addiction, something that could one day help people understand just how serious of a disease addiction actually is.