Drug Addiction

            In today’s society, smoking is becoming an alarmingly growing problem. Countless people die each and every day from smoking. The question is why? Quite often, growing up you heard the phrase, “it only takes one to get addicted”. The reason being, the critical component of tobacco-nicotine is extremely addictive.  As an increasing problem in today’s society, it is extremely important that we proactively look for ways to attack addiction. It is important though that we look for ways to help treat addiction that is inclusive to other drugs as well such as cocaine, THC, methamphetamines, etc.  Recently, a speaker in my neuroscience class actually addressed this issue.  Daniel S. McGehee discussed a paper of his that focuses on nicotine’s effect on the human body. McGehee’s experiment focuses on the dopaminergic pathway; Specifically, it focuses on nicotine’s interaction with receptors and consequently, its effect on neuron excitability and synaptic strength. To study these effects, he studied the effect of nicotine on brain slices from adult male rats.  Results showed that when brain slices are exposed to nicotine, excitatory synaptic plasticity is induced. Furthermore, exposure to nicotine also leads to enhanced glutamatergic activity and subsequently changes neuronal synaptic levels. Even more interesting was the fact that the results of McGehee’s experiment showed mechanistic similarities between the cocaine and nicotine pathways. This last piece of information is something I found extremely interesting. First of all, a study was able to find specifically how nicotine impacts the brain, but the study was also able to show a significant amount of overlap between cocaine and nicotine mechanisms. This information is extremely important because it gives hope to not only deal with addiction problems in nicotine, but also other drugs as well. If there are multiple drugs that have similar mechanisms then hopefully soon we can find better treatments/therapies for drug addiction in general, not only nicotine specifically. McGehee’s paper became even more interesting when compared to an article I read on e science news online. The article revolved around a pathway called ERK. The article notes a study performed by Dr. Jocelyne Caboche. Within the study it was found that the ERK pathway plays a significant role in multiple drug addictions. At first, only testing cocaine, they found that cocaine induces the active form of ERK and in doing so found that it was actually a common pathway in multiple drugs of abuse.  For example they found that the pathway extended to drugs such as amphetamine, nicotine, morphine, and THC.  Specifically, the researchers discovered that inhibition of ERK activation prevents cocaine induced synaptic plasticity.

 

Both of these articles focused on addictive drugs that are heavily prevalent in society today. McGehee’s study showed that nicotine abuse increases synaptic plasticity and also shows significant overlap with cocaine mechanisms. While on the other hand, the article form e science news focuses on the ERK pathway and actually builds upon the findings from McGehee’s paper. The article on e science news provides a potential treatment target for the effects seen in McGehee’s experiments and has helped us to understand that there is a way to prevent excitatory synaptic plasticity, specifically with the ERK pathway. When combining the information from both experiments, then I believe that is finally possible for us to tackle addiction problems caused from drugs such as THC, nicotine, cocaine, etc.

Overall, McGehee’s paper as well as the article from e science news are extremely interesting and provide extraordinary insight into an extremely prevalent problem in today’s society; A problem that I believe is quite important and constantly growing in today’s society. Hopefully we can use the information from both these articles to finally find new treatments for people who deal with drug abuse.       

Mao, Danyan, Keith Gallagher, and Daniel S. McGehee. "Nicotine Potentiation of Excitatory Inputs to Ventral Tegmental Area Dopamine Neurons." The Journal of Neuroscience (2011): n. pag. Print.

Enzymatic Pathway Common to Drugs of Abuse Could Lead to New Treatment options." Enzymatic Pathway Common to Drugs of Abuse Could Lead to New Treatment Options. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2016.