Addiction to drugs is a major contemporary public health issue, characterized by maladaptive behavior to obtain and consume an increasing amount of drugs at the expense of the individual’s health and social and personal life. We discovered abnormalities in fronto-striatal brain systems implicated in self-control in both stimulant-dependent individuals and their biological siblings who have no history of chronic drug abuse; these findings support the idea of an underlying neurocognitive endophenotype for stimulant drug addiction.
Abnormal brain structure implicated in stimulant drug addiction
Karen Ersche, Simon Jones, G Williams, Abigail Turton, Trevor Robbins and Edward Bullmore
Science. 335(6068):601 — 604 February 2012 doi:10.1126/science.1214463