Possible Breakthrough for Helping Heroin Addicts

Posted by azdrugrehabctr on February 7, 2017 under Addiction Trends, Opiate Abuse | Comments are off for this article

Despite being one of the most abused drugs in the United States, there is very little doctors can do when it comes to a heroin addiction. The most common methods of helping an addict is by prescribing them methadone or suboxone and encouraging them to enroll in a treatment program. And while these options are oftentimes beneficial and have helped many addicts overcome their addiction, many in the medical community wonder if more can be done to help these addicts. Recently, researchers have made progress examining and locating different parts of the brain that are responsible for encouraging addiction and making it more difficult for the addict to stop once they have become addicted. In order to capitalize on these new developments, one research group decided to investigate how this could help heroin addicts.

Focusing on the subthalamic nucleus, a part of the brain that is little is known about, researchers at The Scripps Research Institute treated heroin addicted rats with deep brain stimulation. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is the method of using small electrodes implanted on the brain to electrically stimulate certain areas of the brain. Researchers decided to use DBS and find out if they could help reduce the amount of heroin the rats self-administered. And, in fact they did find that DBS was helpful in reducing heroin intake and cravings among the rats. The research was actually so compelling that many believe that they are now able to transition into studying how DBS effects humans that are addicted to heroin.

“It has been very difficult to reduce heroin-seeking and taking in an animal model because heroin is such an addictive drug, but the results here are very impressive. This is the type of preclinical evidence that one needs, in order to start testing this strategy in humans,” explained Olivier George, associate professor at The Scripps Research Institute.

The more that is discovered about the brain and how different parts of it respond to drugs like heroin, the more the medical community can help come up with tailored treatment programs that help addicts. More research in the area of addiction is what will help reduce the heroin epidemic.