Drugs of abuse are able to elicit compulsive drug-seeking behaviors upon repeated administration, which ultimately leads to the phenomenon of addiction. Evidence indicates that the susceptibility to develop addiction is influenced by sources of reinforcement, variable neuroadaptive mechanisms, and neurochemical changes that together lead to altered homeostasis of the brain reward system. Addict...

INTRODUCTION Behavioral science experts believe that all entities capable of stimulating a person can be addictive; and whenever a habit changes into an obligation, it can be considered as an addiction. Researchers also believe that there are a number of similarities as well as some differences between drug addiction and behavioral addiction diagnostic symptoms. The purpose of this study is to ...

OPIUM WAS widely used in the nineteenth century as an analgesic, a febrifuge, a sedative, and an anti-diarrhoea agent. Opium's addictive properties had been noted in the medical literature as early as 1700, but medical men did not take these very seriously. With the advent of the hypodermic syringe in 1856, which made it possible for morphia (the alkaloid of opium) to be injected, physicians be...

The view that anatomically distinct memory systems differentially contribute to the development of drug addiction and relapse has received extensive support. The present brief review revisits this hypothesis as it was originally proposed 20 years ago (1) and highlights several recent developments. Extensive research employing a variety of animal learning paradigms indicates that dissociable neu...

This review discusses the evidence for the hypothesis that the development of drug addiction can be understood in terms of interactions between Pavlovian and instrumental learning and memory mechanisms in the brain that underlie the seeking and taking of drugs. It is argued that these behaviours initially are goal-directed, but increasingly become elicited as stimulus-response habits by drug-as...

Food addiction is the clinical occurrence in which individuals develop physical and psychological dependencies on high fat, high sugar, and highly palatable foods. Past research has demonstrated a number of similarities between food addiction and drug use disorders including the activation of specific brain regions and neurotransmitters, disrupted neuronal circuitry, and behavioral indicators o...

Clinical and experimental observations show individual differences in the development of addiction. Increasing evidence supports the hypothesis that dopamine receptor availability in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) predisposes drug reinforcement. Here, modeling striatal-midbrain dopaminergic circuit, we propose a reinforcement learning model for addiction based on the actor-critic model of striatum...

101 Addiction can be defined from a behavioral viewpoint as repeated self-administration of alcohol or other drugs (AOD’s) despite knowledge of adverse medical and social consequences and attempts to abstain from AOD use. Typically, an addicted person’s daily activities are centered on obtaining and consuming the drug at the expense of social and occupational commitments. Many factors contribut...

In drug addiction, cues previously associated with drug use can produce craving and frequently trigger the resumption of drug taking in individuals vulnerable to relapse. Environmental stimuli associated with drugs or natural reinforcers can become reliably conditioned to increase behavior that was previously reinforced. In preclinical models of addiction, these cues enhance both drug self-admi...

Drug addiction is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by the compulsive pursuit of drugs of abuse despite potential adverse consequences. Although several decades of studies have revealed that psychostimulant use can result in extensive alterations of neural circuits and physiology, no effective therapeutic strategies or medicines for drug addiction currently exist. Changes in neuronal ...