Hooked

            Tobacco use is universal. It is used across different cultures and generations. The health risks associated with tobacco use is widely known. There are millions of deaths worldwide each year due to tobacco related diseases. One might beg to ask, "if people know how harmful tobacco use is then why use it?" This is due to the nicotine, a highly addictive drug found within tobacco. It behaves as a stimulant within the body. In his research paper, Dr. McGehee discusses that this is due to the fact that nicotine activates nicotinic receptors, nACHRs, thus inducing long term potentiation in the ventral tegmental (VTA) area dopamine neurons. The VTA is a brain region affiliated with motivation, emotion, and addiction. Nicotine excites the neurons within this region. This causes its users to be in a pleasurable state. Many cigarette smokers cite the anxiety reducing capabilities of nicotine to be a key reason why they continue to smoke. Due to its health risks and many other factors, many tobacco users eventually try to quit but the strong addictive nature of nicotine makes this a difficult task.

            Over the years, not many effective methods for quitting have been developed as of yet. However, one recent study done by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies gives us better insight on how we might be able to combat this issue. This study found that removing a specific type of nicotinic receptor protein from dopamine producing brain cells made mice less susceptible to nicotine addiction. The receptor this study focused on was the alpha4 nicotinic receptor of the VTA. Researchers developed mice which had mutations that prevented them from producing the alpha4 receptor on dopamine cells. When compared with normal, wild type mice, the mice lacking these receptors spent less time looking to obtain nicotine. Furthermore, these mice did not display behaviors of reduced anxiety. "These findings show that the rewarding and anxiety-reducing properties of nicotine, thought to play a key role in the development of tobacco addiction, are related to actions at a single set of brain cells," said Paul Kenny, PhD, an expert on drug addiction at Scripps Research Institute, who was unassociated with the study. The findings of this study give us a much better understanding of how the mechanism of nicotine addiction works which can allow us to come up with more efficient ways of dealing with it. It gives us the ability of possibly creating new pharmaceutical drugs that can treat tobacco addiction more effectively. The findings of this study can be vital in fighting the pandemic tobacco addiction has become. 

Works Cited

Eliminating protein in specific brain cells blocks nicotine reward. (2011, July 26). Retrieved May 04, 2016, from http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/07/26/eliminating.protein.specific.brain.cells.blocks.nicotine.reward

Mao, D., Gallagher, K., & Mcgehee, D. S. (2011). Nicotine Potentiation of Excitatory Inputs to Ventral Tegmental Area Dopamine Neurons. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(18), 6710-6720.