How to Break Nicotine Addiction

Ever since I was young, I would hear about the negative effects of cigarette smoking in school and in the media. There have been so many public service announcements and outreach initiatives to inform people of the deleterious effects of cigarette smoking. But even after all of these efforts, why does the number of smokers continue to increase? Furthermore, why is it so difficult for people to stop smoking once they have already started? The answers to both of these questions comes back to the major addictive substance in tobacco, nicotine. Nicotine provides relaxing and soothing sensations to the brain and provides small energy boosts to the user. In general, it acts on people’s reward systems. People who are addicted to nicotine feel stress and lethargy when they stop smoking because of the nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Nicotine from cigarettes can be a very addictive substance, like alcohol or other drugs. Addiction is a very complicated and growing field of neuroscience research. Neuroscientists will only be able to find effective and long term treatments for addiction when they understand what happens at the biological level, in different parts of the brain, in a person with addiction.

Some light was shined upon this topic when Dr. Daniel McGehee from the University of Chicago talked about the neural mechanisms of nicotine reward and aversion when he came to speak at Loyola University Chicago on February 23^rd. He talked about his team’s paper Nicotine Potentiation of Excitatory Inputs to Ventral Tegmental Area Dopamine Neurons. He mentioned the prior achievements of his team, which included reporting that nicotine helped in the induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons. This was done by increasing glutamate release via action of a7 nAChRs on the glutamate terminals. This showed an important presynaptic contribution of nicotine in LTP induction (Mao et. al). Simply, they were able to get a deeper understanding of the effects of nicotine in the ventral tegmental area’s cellular circuits. This information was used to test the effect of nicotine on excitatory synaptic strength in the experiment that he presented to us.

After listening to Dr. McGehee’s talk, I was reminded of an article in the New York Times that had to do with smoking and (less scientific) methods that people have used to stop smoking, including behavioral changes as well as different medicines. This article titled, Taming That Overwhelming Urge to Smoke, gave more of a layman’s description of what smoking and nicotine do to the brain and the reward pathway, and how different medications can affect this. It explained that the nicotine makes the brain feel like the act of smoking is integral to the survival of the organism. It went on to explain that nicotine isn’t equally addictive for everyone and that it has to do with that person’s genetics. Then article mentions a common drug that disguises itself as nicotine and occupies the brains nicotine receptors (so the real nicotine cannot bind) which in turn allows it to lessens cravings. But there were some common psychiatric side-effects with this medicine that made it undesirable.

This article was similar to Dr. McGehee’s talk in that the discussion of public health was at the center of both of them. The potential affects of being able to elucidate the mechanism of effect of nicotine or finding a medicine that could work to stop nicotine addiction could majorly affect public health and save many people’s lives as well as millions of dollars in healthcare costs.

References:

Brody, J. E. (2012). Plan to Become an Ex-Smoker for Good. Retrieved March 04, 2016, from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/plan-to-become-an-ex-smoker-for-good/

Downs, M. (2013). Taming That Overwhelming Urge to Smoke. Retrieved March 04, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-smoking-ess.html

Mao, Danyan, Keith Gallagher, and Daniel S. McGehee. “Nicotine Potentiation of Excitatory Inputs to VTA Dopamine Neurons.” The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 31.18 (2011): 6710–6720.PMC. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.