{"id":10322,"date":"2014-10-30T16:07:13","date_gmt":"2014-10-30T16:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=10322"},"modified":"2016-09-21T10:56:13","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T10:56:13","slug":"neurobiology-of-addiction-pet-scans-show-changes-in-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2014\/10\/neurobiology-of-addiction-pet-scans-show-changes-in-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Neurobiology of Addiction: PET Scans Show Changes in the Brain."},"content":{"rendered":"

Neurobiology of Addiction: PET Scans Show Changes in the Brain.<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0
\n\"\"The world tends to look at addicts as people who have a character flaw. Are they poor decision makers? Are they narcissists? Are they anti-social? For the most part, we don\u2019t do that with other people and their diseases.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, you\u2019re diabetic, you must be narcissistic. You have high blood pressure, you\u2019re a poor decision maker. No, we don\u2019t do that. So we\u2019ve got to really come forward with drug addiction as a disease,\u201d said JeanAnne Johnson Talbert, DHA, APRN-BC, FNP, CARN-AP, medical director of Steps Recovery Center, Payson, UT, at the American Psychiatric Nurses Association 28th Annual Conference, held October 22-25, 2014, in Indianapolis, IN.<\/p>\n

In the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that was published last year, addiction is classified as a \u201csubstance abuse disorder.\u201d According to Talbert, \u201cthe newly revised edition took out the \u2018legal ramifications\u2019 criteria and substituted \u2018craving.\u2019 And that\u2019s where you\u2019re starting to see some progression with treating this disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the big deal? Nearly 23 million Americans are addicted to alcohol or other drugs. Tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drug addiction costs this country $524 billion a year in direct and indirect costs. The economic burden is twice as much as any other disease affecting the brain.<\/p>\n

You may know people who can drink a whole bottle of wine in one evening and then not touch it again for months. And you may know people who can drink socially or on the weekends or holidays. People can also abuse substances, but not all of those people are actually addicted. Then there is full addiction, which involves changes to structures of the brain. \u201cA person can fluctuate in and out of occasional or social abuse, but once you get into the actual addiction, you don\u2019t fluctuate. You\u2019re stuck,\u201d said Talbert.<\/p>\n

No one starts out wanting to become an addict, she added. \u201cYou may just want to feel good or better, but the younger you are when you start using, the more likely it is that you\u2019ll become addicted,\u201d said Talbert.<\/p>\n

Addiction is a chronic and progressive brain disease of the reward, motivation, and memory pathway that moves from an impulse or positive reinforcement to compulsive and negative reinforcement. Brain structure and function change.<\/p>\n

Addiction can also affect clinicians. \u201cWhat really happens in the brain to cause an addicted doctor to lose control and his license to practice medicine? Addiction hijacks your brain and makes you do things that you normally wouldn\u2019t do,\u201d\u201d said Talbert. The thing that\u2019s really important with addiction is this term \u2018plasticity,\u2019 which means that the brain actually changes in response to experiences.\u00a0 This involves both excitatory and inhibitory influences,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Positron emission tomography (PET) scans and other research over the past 20 years have increased our understanding of the neurologic processes that underlie addiction. Addiction affects the brain circuits involved in reward, motivation, memory, and even inhibitory control.<\/p>\n

Talbert said drugs release dopamine\u2011\u2011the same chemical you feel after good sex, food, and relationships\u2011\u2011in the nucleus accumbens. \u201cYou want more. But over time in an addict\u2019s brain, the same drug of choice no longer has that appeal. Then compulsion rears its ugly head and cravings control the addict, sometimes even after years of abstinence,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Source: http:\/\/www.hcplive.com\/conferences\/apna-2014\/Neurobiology-of-Addiction-PET-Scans-Show-Changes-in-the-Brain-#sthash.1OhEsrGb.dpuf<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neurobiology of Addiction: PET Scans Show Changes in the Brain. \u00a0 The world tends to look at addicts as people who have a character flaw. Are they poor decision makers? Are they narcissists? Are they anti-social? For the most part, we don\u2019t do that with other people and their diseases. \u201cOh, you\u2019re diabetic, you must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addiction","category-brain-and-behaviour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}