(Press-News.org) WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 26, 2013 – A Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center team studying alcohol addiction has new research that might shed light on why some drinkers are more susceptible to addiction than others.
Jeff Weiner, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist, and colleagues used an animal model to look at the early stages of the addiction process and focused on how individual animals responded to alcohol. Their findings may lead not only to a better understanding of addiction, but to the development of better drugs to treat the disease as well, Weiner said.
"We know that some people are much more vulnerable to alcoholism than others, just like some people have a vulnerability to cancer or heart disease," Weiner said. "We don't have a good understanding of what causes this vulnerability, and that's a big question. But if we can figure it out, we may be able to better identify people at risk, as well as gain important clues to help develop better drugs to treat the disease."
The findings are published in the March 13 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Weiner, who directs the Translational Studies on Early-Life Stress and Vulnerability to Alcohol Addiction project at Wake Forest Baptist, said the study protocol was developed by the first author of the paper, Karina Abrahao, a graduate student visiting from the collaborative lab of Sougza-Formigoni, Ph.D, of the Department of Psychobiology at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Weiner said the study model focused on how individual animals responded to alcohol. Typically, when a drug like alcohol is given to a mouse every day, the way the animals respond increases – they become more stimulated and run around more. "In high doses, alcohol is a depressant, but in low doses, it can have a mellowing effect that results in greater activity," he said. "Those low dose effects tend to increase over time and this increase in activity in response to repeated alcohol exposure is called locomotor sensitization."
Prior studies with other drugs, such as cocaine and amphetamine, have suggested that animals that show the greatest increases in locomotor sensitization are also the animals most likely to seek out or consume these drugs. However, the relationship between locomotor sensitization and vulnerability to high levels of alcohol drinking is not as well established, Weiner said.
Usually when researchers are studying a drug, they give it to one test group while the other group gets a control solution, and then they look for behavioral differences between the two, Weiner said. But in this study, the researchers focused on individual differences in how each animal responded to the alcohol. A control group received a saline injection while another was injected with the same amount of alcohol every day for three weeks. Weiner said they used mice bred to be genetically variable like humans to make the research more relevant.
"We found large variations in the development of locomotor sensitization to alcohol in these mice, with some showing robust sensitization and others showing no more of a change in locomotor activity than control mice given daily saline injections," Weiner said. "Surprisingly, when all of the alcohol-exposed mice were given an opportunity to voluntarily drink alcohol, those that had developed sensitization drank more than those that did not. In fact, the alcohol-treated mice that failed to develop sensitization drank no more alcohol than the saline-treated control group."
The authors also conducted a series of neurobiological studies and discovered that mice that showed robust locomotor sensitization had deficits in a form of brain neuroplasticity – how experiences reorganize neural pathways in the brain – that has been linked with cocaine addiction in other animal models.
"We found that this loss of the ability of brain cells to change the way that they communicate with each other only occurred in the animals that showed the behavioral response to alcohol," he said. "What this suggests for the first time in the alcohol addiction field is that this particular deficit may represent an important brain correlate of vulnerability to alcoholism. It's a testable hypothesis. That's why I think it's an important finding."
###Funding support for the research came from the National Institutes of Health (AA 21099, AA 17531, AA 10422 and AA 14445), Coordenadoria de Aperfeic¸oamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES; Grant 0321-10-9), Fundac¸a˜o de Amparo a` Pesquisa do Estado de Sa˜o Paulo (FAPESP; Grant 2008/01819-5), and Associac¸a˜o Fundo de Incentivo a`Pesquisa (AFIP).
The Translational Studies on Early-Life Stress and Vulnerability to Alcohol Addiction project is an NIH-funded collaborative grant which supports rodent, non-human primate and human studies investigating neurobiological mechanisms associated with vulnerability and resilience to alcohol addiction.
Co-authors include: Olusegun Ariwodola, Tracy Butler, Andrew Rau, Mary Jane Skelly, Eugenia Carter, Nancy Alexander and Brian McCool, all of Wake Forest Baptist, and Maria Lucia Formigoni of the Universidade de Sao Paulo.
DETROIT – In a nationwide study of patients undergoing surgery for cancer, Henry Ford Hospital researchers have found that while infections during hospital stays increased during a 10-year period, the death rate from those infections dropped.
The findings suggest that diagnosis and management of healthcare-associated infection, or HAI, have improved over time.
The study appears in the current issue of the journal Cancer.
"Cancer patients often have surgery as part of their treatment and are at increased risk for developing healthcare-associated infection," says study ...
Solar cells are just like leaves, capturing the sunlight and turning it into energy. It's fitting that they can now be made partially from trees.
Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University researchers have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from plants such as trees. Just as importantly, by fabricating them on cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates, the solar cells can be quickly recycled in water at the end of their lifecycle.
The technology is published in the journal Scientific Reports, the latest open-access journal from ...
Having more authority in the workplace comes with many rewards – including greater forms of job control and higher earnings. However, according to new research out of the University of Toronto, the benefits are not evenly distributed for women and men.
Sociologist Scott Schieman, lead author of the study, found key differences between men and women in both the levels and implications of greater job authority. First, roughly 24 per cent of men report managerial authority compared to only 16 per cent of women. Moreover, the association between managerial authority and ...
BOSTON (March 26, 2013) — As public health authorities across the globe grapple with the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, Tufts University School of Medicine microbiologists and colleagues have identified the unique resistance mechanisms of a clinical isolate of E. coli resistant to carbapenems. Carbapenems are a class of antibiotics used as a last resort for the treatment of disease-causing bacteria, including E. coli and Klebsiella pneumonia, which can cause serious illness and even death. Infections involving resistant strains fail to respond to antibiotic ...
COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research explains how certain traits can pass down from one generation to the next – at least in plants – without following the accepted rules of genetics.
Scientists have shown that an enzyme in corn responsible for reading information from DNA can prompt unexpected changes in gene activity – an example of epigenetics.
Epigenetics refers to modifications in the genome that don't directly affect DNA sequences. Though some evidence has suggested that epigenetic changes can bypass DNA's influence to carry on from one generation to the next, this ...
The welfare of poultry could be improved by a discovery about how chickens regulate their appetites.
Scientists have identified how a chicken's genetic make-up can affect the signals sent from its stomach to its brain that tell a chicken when it has had enough to eat.
Poultry farmers often have to restrict food for chickens because some birds are insensitive to feelings of fullness and can overeat, affecting their ability to reproduce.
The study could make it easier to develop methods to develop diets that reduce excess growth more naturally in these birds.
Researchers ...
VIDEO:
Biology researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, wanted to know if organic food is healthier than conventionally grown food. To test that, they fed one group of fruit flies an...
Click here for more information.
A new study looking at the potential health benefits of organic versus non-organic food found that fruit flies fed an organic diet recorded better health outcomes than flies fed a nonorganic diet.
The study from the lab of SMU biologist Johannes ...
When NASA's twin GRAIL spacecraft made their final descent for impact onto the Moon's surface last December, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's sophisticated payload was in position to observe the effects. As plumes of gas rose from the impacts, the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) aboard LRO detected the presence of mercury and hydrogen and measured their time evolution as the gas rapidly expanded into the vacuum of space at near-escape velocities.
NASA intentionally crashed the GRAIL twins onto the Moon on Dec. 17, 2012, following successful prime and extended science ...
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently
published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Journal of Geophysical
Research-Planets (JGR-P), Space Weather (SW), and Journal of Geophysical
Research-Biogeosciences, (JGR-G).
In this release:
1. Global fires after the asteroid impact probably caused the K-Pg extinction
2. Predicting fire activity using terrestrial water storage data
3. Monitoring subsidence and vent wall collapse on Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii
4. Italian all-sky imager tracks auroral red arcs over Europe
5. Nonnative ...
PITTSBURGH—Those suffering from swallowing difficulties, especially stroke patients, could be evaluated more efficiently and noninvasively thanks to research under way at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Toronto.
Ervin Sejdic, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering, is developing a small sensor that's externally placed on the neck near the thyroid and records how a person swallows. The primary author of a study on the sensor published online in IEEE Transactions of Biomedical Engineering, Sejdic ...
