Drug Addiction: A Brain Disease? :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Drug Addiction A mentality Disease?When masses hear the crys do medicates addict, these words adjudge negative con nonations and stigmas attached to them. People visualize a person who does not c be about anything, including family, work, or commitments, except for obtaining money to buy doses to position high. However, at that place ar many people who are drug addicts that arrest a normal, functioning life. Before we trick examine why these people are inclined to drugs, one must first define the word addict. George F. Koob defines dependance as a compulsion to take a drug without control over the consumption and a chronic relapse roughness (1). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric knowledge defined substance dependence as a syndrome basically similar to addiction, and the diagnostic criteria used to describe the symptoms of substance dependence to a great(p) extent define compulsion and loss of control of drug intake (1). Considering drug addiction as a disorder implies that there are some biological factors as well as social factors. in that respect are many biological factors that are involved with the addicted intellect. The addicted brain is distinctly different from the nonaddicted brain, as manifested by changes in brain metabolic activity, receptor availability, gene expression, and responsiveness to environmental cues. (2) In the brain, there are many changes that take place when drugs enter a persons inception stream. The pathway in the brain that the drugs take is first to the ventral tegmentum to the burden accumbens, and the drugs also go to the limbic system and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is called the mesolimbic reward system. The activation of this reward system seems to be the common element in what hooks drug users on drugs (2). Drugs seem to cause surges in dopamine neurotransmitters and other frolic brain messengers. However, the brain quickly adapts and these circu its desensitize, which allows for withdrawal symptoms to occur (3). Drug addiction works on some of the same neurobiological mechanisms that aid in study and memories (3). This new view of dopamine as an aid to learning rather than a pleasure mediator may help apologise why many addictive drugs, which unleash massive surges of the neurotransmitter in the brain, can drive continued use without producing pleasure-as when cocaine addicts continue to take hits gigantic after the euphoric effects of the drug have worn despatch or when smokers smoke after cigarettes become distasteful. (4) Since memory and pleasure zones are intertwined in the brain, many researchers have been using psychological approaches to stop drug use.