How Cocaine Scrambles Genes in the Brain
January 8, 2010 by Infowars Ireland
By Maia Szalavitz
www.time.com
It’s hardly a secret that taking cocaine can change the way you feel and the way you behave. Now, a study published in the Jan. 8 issue of Science shows how it also alters the way the very genes in your brain operate. Understanding this process could eventually lead to new treatments for the 1.4 million Americans with cocaine problems, and millions more around the world.
The study, which was conducted in mice, is part of a hot new area of research called epigenetics, which explores how experiences and environmental exposures affect genes. “This is a major step in understanding the development of cocaine addiction and a first step towards generating ideas for how we might use epigenetic regulation to modulate the development of addiction,” says Peter Kalivas, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, who was not associated with the study. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)
Though we think about our genes mostly in terms of the traits we pass onto our children, they are actually very active in our lives every day, regulating how various cells in our bodies behave. In the brain this can be especially powerful. Any significant experience triggers changes in brain genes that in turn produce proteins — those necessary to help memories form, for example. But, says lead author Ian Maze, a Ph.D. student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, “When you give an animal a single dose of cocaine, you start to have genes aberrantly turn on and off in a strange pattern that we are still trying to figure out.”
Maze’s research focused on a particular protein — called G9a — that is associated with cocaine-related changes in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region essential for the experience of desire, pleasure and drive. The role of the protein appears to be to shut down genes that shouldn’t be on. Onetime use of cocaine increases levels of G9a. But repeated use works the other way — suppressing the protein and reducing its overall control of gene activation. Without enough G9a, those overactive genes cause brain cells to generate more dendritic spines, which are the parts of the cells that make connections to other cells. (See TIME’s pictures of antinarcotics cops in Africa.) Read more…
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Whenever cocaine arrives at the brain reward system, it blocks the dopamine transport sites, which are responsible for the reuptake of dopamine in dopaminergic synapeses in this region. Therefore, dopamine is not removed from the synaptic gap, and it remains free there, in ever increasing amounts, because successive nervous stimuli continue to arrive and to release dopamine. The effect remains until cocaine is removed from the presynaptic terminals. It is believed that the abnormally long presence of dopamine in the brain is responsible for the pleasure effects associated to the use of cocaine. The prolonged use of cocaine makes the brain to adapt to it, and the overall synthesis of dopamine by the neurons is decreased. Between cocaine doses, or when the use of cocaine is interrupted, the drug user experiences the opposite of pleasure, due to the low levels of dopamine: fatigue, depression and altered moods.