New knowledge of how addictions form has the potential to change approaches to treatment

Writing for The conversation, Karla Kaun, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Brown University says that: “Many people are wired to seek and respond to rewards. Your brain interprets food as rewarding when you are hungry and water as rewarding when you are thirsty. But addictive substances like alcohol and drugs of abuse can overwhelm the natural reward pathways in your brain, resulting in intolerable cravings and reduced impulse control”.
A popular misconception is that addiction is a result of low willpower. But an explosion of knowledge and technology in the field of molecular genetics has changed our basic understanding of addiction drastically over the past decade. The general consensus among scientists and health care professionals is that there is a strong neurobiological and genetic basis for addiction”.
As a behavioral neurogeneticist leading a team investigating the molecular mechanisms of addiction, Kaun combines neuroscience with genetics to understand how alcohol and drugs influence the brain. In the past decade, she has seen changes in researchers’ understanding of the molecular mechanisms of addiction, largely due to a better understanding of how genes are dynamically regulated in the brain. New ways of thinking about how addictions form have the potential to change how we approach treatment.