“A lot of people try drugs, but only some of them become addicted,” says David Self, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale. He and his colleagues have set out to discover why this is so, and their most recent study points to a possible red flag for cocaine addiction. Unlike other users who experiment and then move on, prospective addicts tend to increase the amount of the drug sharply in the early stages of use.
The team provided a group of rats with an unlimited supply of cocaine for 10 days, allowing them to “self-administer” by pressing a lever. When the supply was cut off, the rats that had shown the greatest escalation of cocaine use in the early part of the study continued to press the lever with a persistence and intensity that signaled extreme cravings—a hallmark of addiction.
The next step in this investigation, says Self, is to locate this predisposition within the animal’s genes, a prospect that could lead to new ideas for early intervention and more effective treatment. The study was published in the June issue of Neuropsychopharmacology.
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