Non-Invasive Stimulation to Combat Addiction Relapse: The Biology

85% of individuals relapse within a year of treatment, according to the Nation Institute on Drug Abuse.

That statistic is absolutely crazy, most people who do rehab are not getting better quickly. The actual treatment for addiction is very inefficient and it puts the person in lots of pain.

2/3 individuals return to drug use within weeks of beginning addiction treatment, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine

For many people with addiction, going to get treatment is already extremely hard. After going to rehab or getting treatment, if the process makes them feel worst, most people won’t want to get better.

To get better treatment, we need to understand how addiction works. In this two-part article, we will be understanding why addiction happens and introduce a new solution.

Background

In cavemen times, the usual sources of happiness were finding a food source or finding a mate. These are the basic needs of survival and to make sure we remember to continue doing it, our body makes us remember it. When those things happened, our body produced dopamine which engraved the feeling and memory into our head so we would keep doing it, for the survival of the species. When we get addicted to something, it uses the same concept.

The reward center in our brain is called the limbic system. It has many structures that control our emotional and behavioural responses to information it receives. Most things related to addiction, are located here.

The chemical dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which are basically dopamine is a neurotransmitter. Our brains produce over 100 different neurotransmitters and we’re discovering more and more. Neurotransmitters pass signals from neuron to neuron or to another cell it wants to activate.

There are two types of neurotransmitters, excitatory and inhibitory. Excitatory transmitters find a target cell and fill it up with chemical energy like dopamine and endorphins. Whereas inhibitory transmitters, keep their target cells still and calm like serotonin.

While facing addiction, we face problems with the excitatory transmitters, specifically dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that forms declarative memories. It activates when something good happens and forces your body to remember the feeling so it does it more. When produces with endorphins, a chemical that helps cope with pain, it causes pleasure and people getting addicted to that.

“addiction exploits the brain’s ability to vividly remember unnatural highs and motivate itself to find more of them in the future”

The 3 Stages of Addiction

1. Binge/Intoxication

This stage is when the person first starts doing the thing they’re gonna get addicted to. They start getting those dopamine bursts and endorphins are also released. This pleasure can act as a distraction from anything going on in their lives which can make the addiction worst in many cases.

Addiction affects the globus pallidus is a part of the basal ganglia and is associated with the formation of habits and automimic behaviours. When getting addicted to drugs, they prompt the globus pallidus to make any drug-related behaviour into habits.

The prefrontal cortex(PFC) is in charge of executive functions like planning and decision-making. It usually inhibits lower brain regions such as the nucleus accumbens. Drugs weaken this ability and make you more impulsive and irrational with your decisions.

2. Withdrawal/Negative effects

The next stage happened when dopamine levels go way beyond what is normal. Over time, too much dopamine being produced weakens the neuroplasticity of the transmitters. This causes the transmitters to produce lower amounts of dopamine.

This causes a craving for high dopamine when your body physically can’t create it and being normal(not doing the thing you’re addicted to) would make you terrible. This causes symptoms like anxiety and irritability and the thing they’re addicted to doesn’t cause pleasure anymore. At this point, the addiction turns into a deep compulsive need.

3. Preoccupation/Anticipation

This is when the user craves what they’re addicted to constantly and it leads to a disorder. They lose complete control of their prefrontal cortex and compromises frontal lobe structures.

It messed with the compromised frontal lobe structures(evaluation, judgement, and decision-making), the dorsolateral PFC(higher cognitive functions) and the anterior cingulate gyrus(detection and appraisal of social processes).

It also alters glutamatergic signalling which plays a critical role in memory formation and consolidation as well as behaviour initiation. The memory declaration from the dopamine happens here. Large amounts of dopamine received by the prefrontal cortex during drug use prompt which releases glutamate in the midbrain committing the drug and the experience to memory.

Being addicted to drugs is very hard to get out of because they act like neurotransmitters. For example, heroin is extremely addictive because it has a similar structure to dopamine, tricking your body.

Your brain continuously gets reshaped by drugs with new paths inserted into it with drug-related information. All of this info is stored in the hippocampus. When addicted to drugs, your basolateral amygdala gets activated created highly specific, drug-related cues.

The most common reasons for relapse include stress, negative mood and anxiety, drug-related cued, temptations, boredom, and lack of a positive environment. At stage 2, we understand why people get like this. After the transmitters for the dopamine stop working well, you just get lower than you started with and these symptoms start.

At this point, your cravings will be higher than ever, and there’s a very low chance you won’t relapse with the current treatments, and they say that relapsing is part of the process. That shouldn’t be the case and we found a way to aid the process.

Look at this article to figure out how: https://umadarbha.medium.com/non-invasive-stimulation-to-combat-addiction-relapse-the-technology-8d411736322f