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Following a stroke that has caused brain damage, some patients, addicted to nicotine, spontaneously quit smoking. Why not all? It was by seeking to answer this question that American scientists may have discovered how to put an end to cigarettes.
Any patient who smokes and who has just suffered a cerebrovascular accident (CVA) is immediately subjected to smoking cessation. Sometimes it happens spontaneously. Some patients are freed from their addiction overnight.
It was this sudden and radical cessation of smoking that led researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (USA) to research the underlying cerebral mechanism of addiction. Objective: to understand the neural pathway of addiction and determine if it is specific to tobacco. Their results were published in the journal NatureMedicine.
A mapping of addictions established
To carry out this study, American doctors used data from two cohorts of nicotine-dependent patients, aged 56 on average, who suffered brain damage following a stroke.
The researchers compared lesions in patients unable to quit smoking to lesions that resulted in remission from nicotine addiction. Then they mapped these lesions into the overall brain circuitry, which allowed them to establish how an addiction works.
In short, to stop tobacco addiction, it would be necessary to cause lesions in specific areas of the brain, such as the dorsal cingulate, the lateral prefrontal cortex or the insular cortex, but without damaging the medial prefrontal cortex, a location that seems to block the addiction.
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Similar circuits for tobacco and alcohol
The lesions that led to a remission of addiction therefore correspond to a specific brain circuit. However, this cerebral circuit was found in the results of another study on the lesions associated with a reduced risk of alcoholism. There would therefore be a particular neural pathway to target to interrupt an addiction, whatever the product.
“We have found targets for addiction remission and look forward to testing them in randomized clinical trials“, indicated Michael Fox, researcher at the department of neurology of the Bostonian hospital and co-author of the study. One of the ways could pass by the transcranial magnetic stimulation, already used in the treatment of the addiction to alcohol .