605
thousand
u.s. people age 12 and up who
reported in 2009 using heroin
at least once in last year
359
thousand
number of u.s. heroin
addicts, 2010 estimate
Video helps diminish drug cravings
‘extinction’ sessions fight addiction by weakening memories
By Laura Sanders
Watching a five-minute video can help
whitewash memories of past drug use
in former heroin addicts and ease their
cravings, a new study shows. By weakening mental ties between drug-related
paraphernalia and the desire to use, the
method may be a powerful and long-lasting way to help people struggling
with addiction stay clean.
“The process is really simple,” says
study coauthor David Epstein of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse in
Baltimore. “But it’s based on some really
important ideas.”
The method, described in the April
13 Science, seems to work by dampen-
ing the association between using a drug
and cues that remind someone of using.
Walking by a familiar corner where a
dealer works or bumping into an old
friend from drug-using days, for example,
can be hard for people battling addiction.
Led by neuroscientist Lin Lu of Peking
University in China, researchers first
tested the idea in animals, easing drug-
seeking behaviors in rats by calling up
and then dampening drug-related memo-
ries. Next, the team turned to people who
were battling heroin addiction in China.
Mapping your noodle
the impossibly complicated brain just got a little simpler.
Instead of looking like a tangled mess of noodle soup,
pathways in the brain are arranged more like a package of
neatly interwoven ramen noodles, a new brain scanning study
reveals. the results offer more clues to how the human
brain gets built and how it has evolved. scientists led by
Van Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
Medical school in Boston used a scanning technique called
diffusion magnetic resonance imaging, which detects the
direction of traffic flow along white matter tracts, the brain’s
information superhighways. the scans revealed that these
brain signals form a grid made up of parallel and perpendicular tracts woven together into curved sheets. this grid is a
general feature of primate brains, suggesting it has deep evolutionary roots, Wedeen and colleagues report in the March 30
Science. — Laura Sanders
