Europe PMC

This website requires cookies, and the limited processing of your personal data in order to function. By using the site you are agreeing to this as outlined in our privacy notice and cookie policy.

The Brain on Drugs: From Reward to Addiction.

Author information

Affiliations

  • 1. National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
      Authors
    • Volkow ND 1
    • Morales M 1
    (2 authors)

Cell, 01 Aug 2015, 162(4):712-725
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.07.046 PMID: 26276628 

Review

Abstract 

Advances in neuroscience identified addiction as a chronic brain disease with strong genetic, neurodevelopmental, and sociocultural components. We here discuss the circuit- and cell-level mechanisms of this condition and its co-option of pathways regulating reward, self-control, and affect. Drugs of abuse exert their initial reinforcing effects by triggering supraphysiologic surges of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens that activate the direct striatal pathway via D1 receptors and inhibit the indirect striato-cortical pathway via D2 receptors. Repeated drug administration triggers neuroplastic changes in glutamatergic inputs to the striatum and midbrain dopamine neurons, enhancing the brain's reactivity to drug cues, reducing the sensitivity to non-drug rewards, weakening self-regulation, and increasing the sensitivity to stressful stimuli and dysphoria. Drug-induced impairments are long lasting; thus, interventions designed to mitigate or even reverse them would be beneficial for the treatment of addiction.

Full text links 

Read article at publisher's site: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.07.046

Read article for free, from open access legal sources, via Unpaywall: http://www.cell.com/article/S0092867415009629/pdfUnpaywall

References 

Articles referenced by this article (177)

Show 10 more references (10 of 177)

Citations & impact 

Impact metrics

557
Citations
Jump to Citations
1
Data citation
Jump to Data

Citations of article over time

Alternative metrics

Altmetric item for https://www.altmetric.com/details/4393193
Altmetric
Discover the attention surrounding your research
https://www.altmetric.com/details/4393193

Smart citations by scite.ai
Smart citations by scite.ai include citation statements extracted from the full text of the citing article. The number of the statements may be higher than the number of citations provided by EuropePMC if one paper cites another multiple times or lower if scite has not yet processed some of the citing articles.
Explore citation contexts and check if this article has been supported or disputed.
https://scite.ai/reports/10.1016/j.cell.2015.07.046

Supporting
Mentioning
Contrasting
25
777
0

Article citations

Go to all (557) article citations

Data 

Similar Articles 

To arrive at the top five similar articles we use a word-weighted algorithm to compare words from the Title and Abstract of each citation.