A team of Swiss researchers working with laboratory mice say they have found a way to reverse the effects of cocaine on the brain, the official Swissinfo website reported on Saturday.
The researchers from Geneva University claim that their findings could lead to better treatments for drug addiction, which they say affects an estimated 9 million people in Europe, according to the report.
The team focused on the part of the brain known to be involved with pleasure and addictive drugs, succeeding in repressing hyperactive cells charged up by cocaine.
Neuroscientist Christian Luscher, who led the study, said it was the first time the mechanism needed to reverse the effects had been identified.
"This is the piece of the puzzle that was not known before -- the mechanism a cell uses to get back to normal," Luscher was quoted by Swissinfo as saying.
According to Luscher, the research could one day make it easier to treat addicts because scientists now know what needs to be done in the brain to modify the effect of drug use.
He hopes the research will spur others to look at drug addiction as a brain disease and target treatment and studies accordingly.
The study, published in the journal Science, builds on Luscher's earlier research that identified the part of the brain where cells become excited after cocaine use. The goal this time was to figure a way of reversing the impact of cocaine on receptors in the brain.
Luscher and his team at Geneva University's department of basic neurosciences targeted the receptors that go into overdrive after cocaine use. They found that in order to correct the imbalance brought on by cocaine they needed to replace the affected receptors with new ones.
To do this, they administered a short burst of stimulation to another set of receptors to repress the hyper-charged cells.
"We have reversed the effect of cocaine and we show how the machinery in the cells has to be engaged in order to be reversed," he said.
Source: Xinhua
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