Cocaine seems to exploit brain pathways that prioritize food and water.

Continued use of drugs such as cocaine and morphine is thought to affect the way the brain prioritizes the body’s basic needs, but we are only now understanding how this happens.

When people repeatedly misuse drugs, they can experience long-term behavioral changes, where they choose to take drugs instead of doing what they need to do, such as eating or drinking.

A brain pathway called the mesolimbic reward system is thought to be involved in this process, but few studies have directly compared the system’s response to drug intake and its response when its innate needs are not met.

now, bowen tan from Rockefeller University in New York and colleagues showed that the same neurons are activated in these two situations. They revealed this using sophisticated microscopy equipment that can track the activity of individual neurons in the brains of mice in a state of withdrawal after repeated exposure to these drugs.

“There has long been a debate in this field about whether there are specialized cell types that encode only drug value and specialized cell types that encode only natural reward value,” Tan said. To tell. “What we saw is that these drugs of abuse typically activate the same set of neurons as natural rewards.”

The researchers also observed that after giving mice cocaine or morphine, their food and water intake decreased, while the neural responses needed to satisfy basic needs were disrupted.

“What’s really remarkable about this finding is that the strong neural responses to food and water are almost replaced by responses to drugs,” he says. Jeremy Day At the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “[This suggests] Drug rewards can override the way the brain converts desire states into behaviors that satisfy those desires.”

Tan and his team also identified a gene called.Rev which appears to be necessary for the drug to have this effect. Rev Because it is part of a cell signaling pathway that is also found in humans, future research could explore how inhibiting this pathway could be used as a treatment for substance misuse, he said. To tell.