BEIJING, July 21 (Xinhua) -- An international team of researchers have analyzed the brain mechanism of drug addiction, shedding light on potential targets for treatment, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Disrupting memories that associate environmental cues with drug experiences holds promise for treating addiction, yet accessing the distributed neural network that stores such memories is challenging.
Researchers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology of the CAS and Stanford University conducted research on mice and identified the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus as a key node in the drug-associated memory network.
Using state-of-the-art technologies including optogenetics and brain-wide activity mapping, they found two neural pathways that are closely related to addictive memory. Experiments on mice showed that manipulation of the two neural pathways can eliminate the associated memory of addiction, thus preventing the occurrence of relapse behavior.
The research demonstrates the potential of targeting the neural pathway for treating drug addiction.
The research was published in the journal Neuron. Enditem
