Drug Therapy + Meditation to Overcome Addiction

On March 18^th, 2014, Dr. Thomas Lyons gave our neuroscience seminar a lecture on mindfulness, meditation, and drug and alcohol use.  He described mindfulness as a concept of awareness and acceptance of our thoughts, emotions and feelings in the present moment. He continued by telling us about a recent study conducted by S. Bowen and M.C. Enkema on a clinical sample found that mindfulness is inversely related to severity of dependence to alcohol. That is, those who are addicted to alcohol are less mindful than those who are not suffering from alcoholism.

            Mindfulness practices include insight meditation and certain types of yoga. These exercises build awareness to one’s breath and the present moment. Multiple parts of the brain are affected during these meditations including: the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, insulae, and amygdala. Mindfulness meditation is being used as a behavioral therapy and is now considered the third wave of therapeutic interventions. This type of therapy focuses on accepting negative thoughts and emotions rather than attempting to control them.  It is possible that this improves stress response, anxiety, and pain perception.

            When it comes to addiction, the abuse of drugs affects the mesolimbic reward system and causes dysfunction in the cortex. In a randomized controlled trial, individuals coming out of drug treatment took an eight-week course (which included meditation, yoga, and discussion of relapse, triggers, and relapse prevention). It was found that those who took part in this course had experienced significant reductions in substance use and cravings compared to the control group. Although this type of mindfulness based relapse prevention might have long-lasting effects on reducing drug use, there is still a lack of strong evidence.

            A recent experiment has added support for this possibility. A unique, interdisciplinary approach to meditation as a drug and behavior therapy, had Yariv Levy, a theoretical computer scientist, work with a neuroscience researcher, a computer scientist, and a neuroeconomist. Together these scientists used virtual subjects in their experiment. As a theoretician, Levy uses a knowledge repository model, where knowledge comes from other peoples’ theories and experiments and relies on increasing amount of available data. Two computational models were used in this study: one pharmacological model and one behavioral-cognitive model. These models helped explore the allostatic theory of addiction, which says that taking a drug stresses the reward system and causes it to lose its homeostatic state. And when the reward system is too stressed, the anti-reward system attempts to help the reward system come back to equilibrium.

            The experiment followed three virtual case studies: one of a virtual subject taking drugs for the first time, relapsing and without therapeutic intervention; one of a virtual subject using a nicotine patch and also without therapeutic intervention; and one where the virtual subject undergoes therapy, which includes meditation. Together, the scientists have scientific and mathematic evidence that “a treatment based on meditation-like techniques can be helpful as a supplement to help someone get out of addiction.” Their paper suggests that rehabilitation strategies that combine meditation practices and drug and behavior therapies are more effective than discussion therapy alone in people overcoming addiction. 

            University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "In addiction, meditation is helpful when coupled with drug, cognitive therapies." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 December 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131219154547.htm>.