Category: From Newswise – Addiction

Worldwide, an estimated 340 million people suffer from an episode of major depression every year. About 20 percent of patients fail to respond to a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Research studies the role of the ventral striatum in processing rewards and its potential for targeting treatment in patients with major depression.

Health educators nationwide who run youth smoking cessation programs now have access to a free toolkit to evaluate their programs at www.HYSQ.org.

Four unhealthy behaviors–smoking, lack of physical activity, poor diet and alcohol consumption–appear to be associated with a substantially increased risk of death when combined, according to a report in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Genetics, a UNC team reported that three genetic regions were associated with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, one region was associated with smoking initiation and one variant was associated with smoking cessation.

White House and U.S. Department of Education representatives will join addiction researchers and recovery program administrators participate in nation’s first conference promoting recovery communities on college campuses.

New research finds any beneficial effect of drinking moderate amounts of alcohol on stroke may be counteracted by cigarette smoking, according to research that will be presented as part of the late-breaking science program at the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto, April 10 – 17, 2010.

In a newly published study, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have shown for the first time that the same molecular mechanisms that drive people into drug addiction are behind the compulsion to overeat, pushing people into obesity.

Recent studies have shown that behaviors such as happiness, obesity, smoking and altruism are “contagious” within adult social networks. In other words, your behavior not only influences your friends, but also their friends and so on. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University have taken this a step farther and found that the spread of one behavior in social networks influences the spread of another behavior, adolescent drug use.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center hope they have begun paving a new pathway in the fight against drug dependence.

Bees prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all, a study from the University of Haifa reveals. “This could be an evolutionary development intended, as in humans, to make the bee addicted,” states Prof. Ido Izhaki, one of the researchers who conducted the study.