HITTING the bottle a little too often? In the future, your doctor may prescribe a dose of extra brain receptors.
Researchers in the US have drastically reduced the intake of alcoholic rats by giving them extra genes for a brain receptor that picks up pleasure signals. The finding could lead to treatments for alcoholism.
Previous studies have shown that chronic alcoholics have reduced levels of the D2 receptor, which binds to dopamine. Since dopamine is linked to feelings of pleasure and is released when people drink or take drugs, it could mean that people with fewer D2 receptors consume more and more drugs to get the same effect.
So Panayotis Thanos of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and his team decided to see if increasing D2 levels could restore the pleasure response and reduce the need for alcohol. They injected a virus carrying the gene for the ...
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