Cocaine addicts’ brains predisposed to abuse
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
Cocaine addicts may have brain deficits that predispose them to drug abuse, and abusing drugs appears to make matters worse, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
They said images of cocaine addicts’ brains reveal abnormalities in the cerebral cortex—the brain’s outer surface—and these changes relate to dysfunction in areas responsible for attention and decision-making.
“These data point to a mixture of both drug effects and predisposition underlying the structural alterations we observed,” said Dr. Hans Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital, whose research appears in the journal Neuron.