A study recently published by a University of Colorado School of Medicine researcher shows that reward circuits in the brain are sensitized in anorexic women and desensitized in obese women. The findings also suggest that eating behavior is related to brain dopamine pathways involved in addictions.

Dr. Guido Frank, assistant professor director of the Developmental Brain Research Program at the CU School of Medicine, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in 63 women who were either anorexic or obese. Scientists compared their results to women considered normal weight.

According to the researchers, the women were visually conditioned to associate certain shapes with either a sweet or a non-sweet solution and then received the taste solutions expectedly or unexpectedly. This task has been associated with brain dopamine function in the past, researchers explain.

The scientists found that an unexpected sweet-tasting solution resulted in increased neural activation of reward systems in the anorexic patients and diminished activation in obese women. In rodents, food restriction and weight loss have been associated with greater dopamine-related reward responses in the brain, the researchers noted.

“It is clear that in humans the brain’s reward system helps to regulate food intake,” said Frank. “The specific role of these networks in eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and, conversely, obesity, remains unclear.”

The study was published in Neuropsychopharmacology.

Source: University of Colorado Denver

A study of 6,242 twins shows a link between fewer years of schooling and the onset of drinking before age 14, report researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System.

The study looked at male twins who served in the military during the Vietnam era, discovering that those who began drinking or using drugs as young teens or who became dependent on alcohol, nicotine or marijuana were less likely to finish college than those who didn’t use alcohol or drugs until later in life and never became dependent.

“We can’t say that substance dependence or early substance use causes lower educational achievement, but we do see a strong association,” said lead author Julia D. Grant, Ph.D., research assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine. “Even after we statistically controlled for the genes and the environmental factors that twins share, we found a relationship between substance use and educational achievement.”

She noted that studying identical and fraternal twins is useful for examining things like substance use and education “because we can assess the extent to which a given behavior is influenced by genetic factors and by factors related to family and environment. Since identical twins share all of their genes and fraternal share about half, we can set up statistical comparisons to tease many of those factors apart.”

In the analysis, the researchers found that when the men began to drink or use drugs early in their teen years or if they became a drug addict or alcoholic, they were less likely to complete 16 years of education.

The men were surveyed when most were in their late 30s or early 40s, a point in their lives when it was less likely they would further their education, Grant added.

Veterans, she says, were a particularly good group to follow because it is rare for anyone to serve in the military without finishing high school or earning a GED. In addition, because of the G.I. Bill, veterans are less likely to have financial constraints that would prevent them from attending college.

The findings provide more evidence that early drug and alcohol use is associated with a large number of problems later in life, according to Grant.

“Drugs and alcohol affect many lifetime milestones, such as marriage, parenthood and employment, which are closely linked to education,” she said. “These events in later life all are influenced by early substance use, and this study provides further evidence that as a society, we need to continue our public-health efforts to reduce underage drinking, smoking and use of drugs.”

Source: Washington University School of Medicine

Researchers at the University of Buffalo and Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that chronic cocaine use reduces the expression of a protein known to regulate brain plasticity in mice, which drives structural changes in the brain, including creating greater sensitivity to the rewarding effects of the drug.

“We found that chronic cocaine exposure in mice led to a decrease in this protein’s signaling,” says David Dietz, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

“The reduction of the expression of the protein, called Rac1, then set in motion a cascade of events involved in structural plasticity of the brain — the shape and growth of neuronal processes in the brain. Among the most important of these events is the large increase in the number of physical protrusions or spines that grow out from the neurons in the reward center of the brain. This suggests that Rac1 may control how exposure to drugs of abuse, like cocaine, may rewire the brain in a way that makes an individual more susceptible to the addicted state.”

The presence of the spines demonstrates the spike in the reward effect that the user obtains from cocaine, he said. By changing the level of expression of Rac1, Dietz and his colleagues were able to control whether the mice became addicted, by preventing enhancement of the brain’s reward center after exposure to cocaine.

To do the experiment, Dietz and his colleagues used a new tool that allowed for light activation to control Rac1 expression. The researchers say this is the first time that a light-activated protein has been used to modulate brain plasticity.

“We can now understand how proteins function in a very temporal pattern, so we could look at how regulating genes at a specific time point could affect behavior, such as drug addiction, or a disease state,” said Dietz.

Dietz is continuing his research on the relationship between behavior and brain plasticity, looking at how plasticity might determine how much of a drug an animal takes and how persistent the animal is in trying to get the drug.

The research was published last month in Nature Neuroscience.

Source: University of Buffalo

The results, based on nationwide surveys of nearly 120,000 U.S. teens, suggest prevention programs may need to be introduced in childhood and early adolescence, said James C. Anthony, Ph.D., of MSU’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Getting out information on the risks of prescription painkillers has become all the more important. Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the death toll from overdoses of prescription painkillers has more than tripled in the past decade.

“While much of the previous thinking was that misuse of these drugs emerged in the final year of high school and during the college-age years, we found that for adolescents the peak risk of starting to misuse these painkillers generally occurs earlier, not during the post-secondary school years,” Anthony said.

The researchers analyzed data from the 2004 through 2008 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health to identify when young people are most likely to start using prescription pain relievers to get high or for other unapproved uses.

The results show about 1 in 60 young people between 12 and 21 years old starts misusing prescription pain relievers each year. Peak risk is at about 16 years, when roughly 1 in 30 to 40 young people start to use painkillers to get high or for other reasons not intended by the prescriber.

“Getting a firm grasp of when the first onset occurs is very important when we try to take public health action to prevent first occurrence,” Anthony said. “With the peak risk at age 16 years and a notable acceleration in risk between ages 13 and 14 years, any strict focus on college students or 12th graders might be an example of too little too late.”

The results reveal a need to strengthen prescribing guidelines and introduce early school-based prevention programs, he said.

He added there also is an opportunity to work with pharmaceutical specialists who sometimes can reformulate these drugs so their effects are blunted when misused.

But it all starts with the prescription. He suggests prescribers should first try nonopioid pain relievers, such as ibuprofen, for kids. When opioid pain killers are prescribed for adolescents — or the drugs are in the reach of teens — the number of tablets should be limited or kept under lock and key, he advised.

“Patients in transient pain are often given a larger opioid prescription than is needed,” he said. “It can end up stacked in the medicine cabinet, available to anyone in or visiting the household.”

The study was published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source: Michigan State University

“Alcohol abuse is a huge problem, and this is a big step forward in identifying a potential new treatment,” said senior author Howard L. Fields, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology and director of the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction at UCSF.

Study participants were seeking treatment for smoking, not drinking, and were randomly given either varenicline or a placebo. By the end of the study, volunteers taking varenicline had reduced their average number of drinks per week by 36 percent compared to those taking placebo.

Researchers found no link between the average number of drinks each participant consumed per week with the average number of cigarettes smoked, suggesting that the drug’s effects on drinking behavior were separate from its effects on smoking.

Although researchers noted that more studies are needed to further examine potential side effects, they are hopeful that varenicline will be used as a treatment for heavy drinking.

“The drug is already widely used by smokers to help them quit,” said Fields. “Many heavy drinkers also smoke, and this study indicated that, in this group, varenicline was effective in reducing both the number of cigarettes smoked and the number of drinks consumed.”

Interestingly, during the study, participants drank the same number of times per week as they did before, said lead author Jennifer Mitchell, Ph.D., clinical project director at the Gallo Center and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology at UCSF.

“People initiated drinking at the same rate, but they drank less once they started,” she said. “If your usual pattern was to come home and have a few beers, you would still do that, but you might have one or two instead of four or five.”

A drug that could reliably decrease alcohol consumption would be of great value in reducing the harm caused by alcohol abuse, said Mitchell.

“If you currently drink seven drinks a night, and we can turn that into two or three, then you’re not only drinking at a level that’s going to harm you less, you’re less likely to harm others, as well.

“If we could lower the rates of drunk driving, spousal and child abuse and other secondary effects of alcoholism, that would be tremendous.”

Researchers noted that the study confirms earlier research by the Gallo Center by showing that alcohol and nicotine work through a common pathway in areas of the brain that offer a feeling of pleasure and reward. Varenicline works by blocking the pleasurable effects of nicotine in the brain.

Few negative side effects were reported, suggesting that the drug can be well-tolerated, said Fields. However, researchers warned that the absence of significant side effects could be because study participants were thoroughly screened for mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation, as well as alcoholism, before the study began.

They suggest that the drug be tested in populations with co-existing psychiatric conditions, as well as with nonsmoking alcohol abusers.

The study was published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

Source:  University of California, San Francisco

Smoking and alcohol photo by shutterstock.

Headed by Cecilie Schou Andreassen, Ph.D., at the University of Bergen, the Facebook Addiction research project has found that the symptoms of Facebook addiction resemble those of addictions to drugs and alcohol.

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale is based on six basic criteria, where all items are scored on a Likert scale.

You can the free Facebook addiction quiz online right now.

Andreassen’s study shows that scoring “often” or “always” on at least four of the seven items may suggest that you are addicted to Facebook.

Researchers hope the scale can facilitate treatment research and clinical assessment, as well as be used to estimate the prevalence of Facebook addiction worldwide.

Andreassen notes that Facebook dependency occurs more regularly among younger users.

“We have also found that people who are anxious and socially insecure use Facebook more than those with lower scores on those traits, probably because those who are anxious find it easier to communicate via social media than face-to-face,” she said.

“People who are organized and more ambitious tend to be less at risk from Facebook addiction. They will often use social media as an integral part of work and networking.”

The research also shows that women are more at risk than men, probably because of the social nature of Facebook, she said.

Source: University of Bergen

In addition to shedding new light on how the brain works, the research, published May 2 in the Journal of Neuroscience, could have important implications for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and other forms of mental illness characterized by decreased motivation, according to the researchers from Vanderbilt University.

Using the brain mapping technique called positron emission tomography (PET scan), the researchers found that people who are willing to work hard for rewards had a higher release of dopamine in areas of the brain known to play a role in reward and motivation, the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

On the other hand, those who were less willing to work hard for a reward had high dopamine levels in another area of the brain that plays a role in emotion and risk perception, the anterior insula.

The role of dopamine in the anterior insula came as a surprise, the researchers noted. It suggests that more dopamine in this area of the brain is associated with a reduced desire to work, even when it means earning less money.

The fact that dopamine can have opposing effects in different parts of the brain complicates the use of psychotropic medications that affect dopamine levels for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder, depression and schizophrenia because it questions the assumption that these drugs have the same effect throughout the brain, the researchers noted.

The study was conducted with 25 healthy volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 29. To determine their willingness to work for a monetary reward, the participants were asked to perform a button-pushing task. They were asked to select an easy or a hard task. Easy tasks earned $1, while the rewards for hard tasks ranged up to $4. The tasks lasted for about 30 seconds and participants were asked to perform them repeatedly for about 20 minutes.

While looking at just 20 minutes of behavior doesn’t conclusively show an individual’s potential for long-term achievement, it “does measure a trait variable such as an individual’s willingness to expend effort to obtain long-term goals,” said psychologist Dr. David Zald.

The research is part of a larger project designed to search for objective measures for depression and other psychological disorders where motivation is reduced, he said.

“Right now our diagnosis for these disorders is often fuzzy and based on subjective self-report of symptoms,” said Zald. “Imagine how valuable it would be if we had an objective test that could tell whether a patient was suffering from a deficit or abnormality in an underlying neural system. With objective measures we could treat the underlying conditions instead of the symptoms.”

Additional research is under way to examine whether individual differences in dopamine levels help explain the altered motivation seen in depression and addiction, he added.

Source: Vanderbilt University

While the task may seem daunting, researchers discovered parents were impressed that they could not only influence their own children, but they can also have a positive influence on their children’s friends as well.

Specifically, researchers discovered that during high school the parents of teenagers’ friends can have as much effect on the teens’ substance use as their own parents.

“Among friendship groups with ‘good parents’ there’s a synergistic effect — if your parents are consistent and aware of your whereabouts, and your friends’ parents are also consistent and aware of their (children’s) whereabouts, then you are less likely to use substances,” said Michael J. Cleveland, Ph.D., research assistant professor at Penn State.

“But if you belong to a friendship group whose parents are inconsistent, and your parents are consistent, you’re still more likely to use alcohol. The differences here are due to your friends’ parents, not yours.”

Cleveland and his colleagues report parenting behaviors and adolescents’ substance-use behaviors to be significantly correlated in the “expected directions” in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

The researchers discovered that higher levels of parental knowledge and disciplinary consistency lead to a lower likelihood of substance use, whereas lower levels lead to a higher likelihood of substance use.

However, if adolescents’ friend’s parents are unaware of their own children’s activities, the risk for substance abuse goes up for both parties.

“The peer context is a very powerful influence,” said Cleveland. “We’ve found in other studies that the peer aspect can overwhelm your upbringing.”

Researchers believe this is the first study to document that parenting at the peer level proved to have a concrete and statistically significant impact on child outcomes.

In the study, researchers surveyed 9,417 9th-grade students during the spring semester, and then again the following spring semester.

The students came from 27 different rural school districts in Pennsylvania and Iowa, all participating in the Promoting School-university-community Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) study.

In 9th grade, the researchers asked the students to name five of their closest friends. The researchers identified social networks within the schools by matching up the mutually exclusive friendships. Overall, the researchers identified 897 different friendship groups, with an average of 10 to 11 students in each group.

At that time, students also answered questions about their perceptions of how much their parents knew about where they were and who they were with. They were also asked about the consistency of their parents’ discipline.

In the 10th-grade follow-up, students responded to questions about their substance use habits, specifically their use of alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana.

Behaviors of friends’ parents influenced substance use even when taking into account the effects of the teens’ own parents’ behaviors and their friends’ substance use, demonstrating the powerful effect of peers on adolescent behavior.

“I think that it empowers parents to know that not only can they have an influence on their own children, but they can also have a positive influence on their children’s friends as well,” said Cleveland.

“And that by acting together — the notion of ‘it takes a village’ — can actually result in better outcomes for adolescents.”

Source: Penn State

Scientists at the University of Cambridge scanned the brains of 120 people who were about the same age and had similar IQs. Half were dependent on cocaine, while the other 60 had no history of substance abuse.

The researchers found that cocaine users lost about 3.08 ml brain volume per year, almost twice the rate of healthy volunteers, who only lost about 1.69 ml per year. The accelerated age-related decline was most prominent in the prefrontal and temporal cortex, important regions of the brain associated with attention, decision-making, and self-regulation, as well as memory.

“As we age, we all lose grey matter,” said Dr. Karen Ersche of the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) at the University of Cambridge.

“However, what we have seen is that chronic cocaine users lose grey matter at a significantly faster rate, which could be a sign of premature aging. Our findings provide new insight into why the cognitive deficits typically seen in old age have frequently been observed in middle-aged chronic users of cocaine.”

The findings highlight the need for preventative strategies, she noted.

“Young people taking cocaine today need to be educated about the long-term risk of aging prematurely,” she said.

Source: University of Cambridge

In the largest imaging study of the human brain ever conducted — involving nearly 1,900 14-year-olds — scientists discovered a number of previously unknown neural networks.

Researchers lead by psychologists Drs. Robert Whelan and Hugh Garavan of the University of Vermont reported that differences in these networks provide strong evidence that some teenagers are at higher risk for drug and alcohol experimentation.

Investigators believe an individual’s neural wiring can cause some to be impulsive. Their findings are presented in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers believe this discovery helps answer a long-standing chicken-or-egg question about whether certain brain patterns come before drug use — or are caused by it.

“The differences in these networks seem to precede drug use,” said Garavan, who also served as the principal investigator of the Irish component of a large European research project, called IMAGEN, that gathered the data about the teens in the new study.

In a key finding, diminished activity in a network involving the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain  is associated with experimentation with alcohol, cigarettes and illegal drugs in early adolescence.

“These networks are not working as well for some kids as for others,” said Whelan, making them more impulsive.

Faced with a choice about smoking or drinking, the 14-year-old with a less functional impulse-regulating network will be more likely to say, “yeah, gimme, gimme, gimme!” said Garavan, “and this other kid is saying, ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’”

Researchers believe that one day, scientists may be able to develop a screen for lower function in this and other brain networks could. This in turn could be used as “a risk factor or biomarker for potential drug use.”

Investigators were also able to show that other newly discovered networks are connected with the symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. These ADHD networks are distinct from those associated with early drug use.

In recent years, there has been controversy and extensive media attention about the possible connection between ADHD and drug abuse. Over the years, investigators have discovered that both ADHD and early drug use are associated with poor inhibitory control—they’re problems that plague impulsive people.

However, this new research suggests that these seemingly related problems are regulated by different networks in the brain. This strengthens the idea that risk of ADHD is not necessarily a full-blown risk for drug use as some recent studies suggest.

The new understanding of brain impulsivity networks—connected areas of activity in the brain revealed by increased blood flow—helps researchers understand the complexity of attributes and behaviors that psychologists call impulsivity—as well as the capacity to put brakes on these impulses, a set of skills sometimes called inhibitory control.

“The take-home message is that impulsivity can be decomposed, broken down into different brain regions,” said Garavan, “and the functioning of one region is related to ADHD symptoms, while the functioning of other regions is related to drug use.”

The new study draws on the multi-year work of the IMAGEN Consortium. Led by a team of scientists across Europe, the team carried out neuroimaging, genetic and behavioral analyses in 2000 teenage volunteers in Ireland, England, France, and Germany and will be following them for several years, investigating the roots of risk-taking behavior and mental health in teenagers.

That teenagers push against boundaries—and sometimes take risks—is a part of adolescence. It happens in all cultures and even across all mammal species: Adolescence is a time to test limits and develop independence.

But death among teenagers in the industrialized world is largely caused by preventable or self-inflicted accidents that are often launched by impulsive risky behaviors, often associated with alcohol and drug use. Additionally, “addiction in the Western world is our number one health problem,” said Garavan.

“Think about alcohol, cigarettes or harder drugs and all the consequences that has in society for people’s health.”

Understanding brain networks that put some teenagers at higher risk for starting to use them could have large implications for public health.

Source: University of Vermont

Substance abuse is a common complement to binge eating, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Investigators believe this finding may help to illuminate factors that promote substance abuse, addiction, and relapse.

“Drug addiction persists as a major problem in the United States,” said Patricia Sue Grigson, Ph.D. “Likewise, excessive food intake, like binge eating, has become problematic. Substance-abuse and binge eating are both characterized by a loss of control over consumption.

“Given the common characteristics of these two types of disorders, it is not surprising that the co-occurrence of eating disorders and substance abuse disorders is high. It is unknown, however, whether loss of control in one disorder predisposes an individual to loss of control in another.”

In the lab, Grigson and her colleagues found a link between bingeing on fat and the development of cocaine-seeking and -taking behaviors in rats.

This relationship suggests that conditions promoting excessive behavior toward one substance can increase the probability of excessive behavior toward another.

The findings are reported in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

To test if a history of binge eating on fat would augment addiction-like behavior toward cocaine, researchers provided the rats four different diets: normal rat chow; continuous access to an optional source of dietary fat; one hour of access to optional dietary fat daily; and one hour of access to dietary fat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

All four groups also had unrestricted access to nutritionally complete chow and water. The researchers then assessed the cocaine-seeking and -taking behaviors.

“Fat bingeing behaviors developed in the rats with access to dietary fat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — the group with the most restricted access to the optional fat,” Grigson said.

This group tended to take more cocaine late in training, continued to try to get cocaine when signaled it was not available, and worked harder for cocaine as work requirements increased.

“While the underlying mechanisms are not known, one point is clear from behavioral data: A history of bingeing on fat changed the brain, physiology, or both in a manner that made these rats more likely to seek and take a drug when tested more than a month later,” Grigson said. “We must identify these predisposing neurophysiological changes.”

While the consumption of fat in and of itself did not increase the likelihood of subsequent addiction-like behavior for cocaine, the irregular binge-type manner in which the fat was eaten proved critical.

Rats that had continuous access to fat consumed more fat than any other group, but were three times less likely to exhibit addiction-like behavior for cocaine than the group with access only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

“Indeed, while about 20 percent of those rats and humans exposed to cocaine will develop addiction-like behavior for the drug under normal circumstances, in our study, the probability of addiction to cocaine increased to approximately 50 (percent) for subjects with a history of having binged on fat,” Grigson said.

Researchers say additional studies will investigate in more detail how bingeing can lead to addiction-like behaviors.

Source: Penn State University

Scientist holding rat photo by shutterstock.

Now, a new instrument developed by researchers from Norway and the United Kingdom will help us know if we are addicted to work.

The tool, called The Bergen Work Addiction Scale, is based on core elements of addiction that are recognized as diagnostic criteria for several addictions.

Some people seem to be driven to work excessively and compulsively. These are denoted as work addicts — or workaholics. Work addictions are a global pandemic, a result of a worldwide economy and globalization, new technology, and blurred boundaries between work and private life, said University of Bergen’s Cecilie Schou Andreassen, Ph.D.

A number of studies show that work addiction has been associated with insomnia, health problems, burnout and stress as well as creating conflict between work and family life, Andreassen said.

Her team developed the new first-of-its-kind instrument; the Bergen Work Addiction Scale is presented in an article in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

By testing themselves with the scale, people can find out their degree of work addiction: non-addicted, mildly addicted or workaholic, Andreassen said.

12,135 Norwegian employees from 25 different industries participated in the development of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale. The scale was administrated to two cross-occupational samples. The scale reflects the seven core elements of addiction: Salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse and problems.

The results show the scale as reliably differentiating between workaholics and non-workaholics.

Researchers believe the scale may add value to work addiction research and practice, particularly when it comes to facilitating treatment and estimating prevalence of work addiction in the general population worldwide.

The Bergen Work Addiction Scale uses seven basic criteria to identify work addiction, where all items are scored on the following scale: (1) Never, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Often, and (5) Always:

• You think of how you can free up more time to work;
• You spend much more time working than initially intended;
• You work in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness and depression;
• You have been told by others to cut down on work without listening to them;
• You become stressed if you are prohibited from working;
• You deprioritize hobbies, leisure activities, and exercise because of your work;
• You work so much that it has negatively influenced your health.

Andreassen’s study shows that scoring of “often” or “always” on at least four of the seven items may suggest that you are a workaholic.

Source: The University of Bergen

Study findings imply that improving self-control in youth can increase children’s chances of success as adults.

Researchers base their supposition from tests of over 900 individuals beginning in toddlerhood.

In the study, investigators found that “people who were rated at age three as being more restless, inattentive, oppositional, and moody than other three-year old children were twice as likely to grow up to have problems with gambling as adults three decades later.”

Experts say this is the first study to establish a connecting link between a so-called “under-controlled” temperament in early childhood and later compulsive gambling.

Wendy S. Slutske, Ph.D., of University of Missouri conducted the study with psychologists Drs. Terrie E. Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, both of Duke University and University College/London; and Dr. Richie Poulton of University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Slutske believes the study answers a crucial question: “How early can we tell a person is at increased risk?”

The study looked at individuals from the Dunedin (New Zealand) Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a longitudinal study of one birth cohort. Based on behaviors observed during a 90-minute assessment, 1,037 three-year-olds were categorized as having one of five temperaments: under-controlled, inhibited, confident, reserved, or well adjusted.

Those children who were categorized as having an under-controlled temperament were more restless, impulsive, and negative and were less able to regulate their emotions.

At ages 21 and 36, 91 percent of the study participants answered questions about gambling behavior.

At 21, 86 percent of the respondents had gambled, but only 13 percent in a “disordered” way—defined by such problems as a preoccupation with gambling; a need to wager more and more to get the same enjoyment; getting into financial, personal, or work-related difficulties because of gambling; and difficulty in cutting down or quitting.

By 32, only about 4 percent of the participants still gambled at that level.

Researchers determined more men became compulsive gamblers and compulsive gambling was also linked to those with low childhood intelligence and socioeconomic status.

Nevertheless, under-controlled temperament in toddlerhood remained a significant predictor of disordered gambling in adulthood, even after gender, intelligence, and socioeconomic status were taken into account.

It is important to keep in mind that the number of people who actually end up becoming compulsive gamblers is relatively small.

But the findings, said Slutske, are still important given “the ever-increasing number of [gambling] temptations our world presents,” such as the opportunities to place bets at home on the Internet at any time of day or night. Some vulnerable individuals may not be well-equipped to handle such temptations.

And the implications of the study may even go beyond gambling.

“It fits into a larger story about how self-control in early childhood is related to important life outcomes in adulthood,” said Slutske.

New programs for boosting self-control—even Sesame Street’s segments on the importance of saving money and waiting until later for goodies—might not only head off a painful future of compulsive gambling but also increase children’s chances of academic success, financial security, and personal happiness when they grow up.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

Although the link between smoking and depression is well-documented, the results support the causal hypothesis regarding smoking and depression rather than simply the “shared-vulnerability” hypothesis.

“Under the shared-vulnerability hypothesis, ever-heavy smokers may be expected to have similar elevated risk for major depressive episode irrespective of their smoking status during followup,” said Salma Khaled, Ph.D. “Our results point to the contrary.”

Khaled, who was employed by the Mental Health Center for Research and Teaching while the research was conducted, and a team evaluated information from 3,824 adults in the Canadian National Population Health Survey.

Participants in the survey were interviewed between 1994 and 1995 and were followed with new interviews conducted every second year through 2006-2007.

To be included in the study, participants had to have maintained their smoking status as current, former, or never smokers throughout the entire survey followup. “Heavy” smokers were identified as those who smoked 20 or more cigarettes per day.

“Ever-heavy smokers (current and former) may share similar genetic, behavioral, and environmental vulnerabilities, at least for heavy smoking initiation,” said Khaled, who is now at the University of Calgary.

If these factors were wholly to blame for depression — as given by the shared-vulnerability hypothesis — then we would see former-heavy smokers and current smokers with an equal likelihood of having a major depressive episode (MDE), Khaled reasoned.

“However, if the persistence of the exposure (current as opposed to former) had the dominant effect on the risk for MDE, then current-heavy smokers would be expected to have higher risks of MDE relative to former-heavy smokers,” said Khaled.

The authors found that, overall, the 12-year risk of MDE for the entire sample was 13.2 percent.

When split by smoking status, the risk of MDE among current-heavy smokers was 26.7 percent; among former-heavy smokers it was 7.1 percent, and among those who never smoked it was 12.2 percent.

These statistics showed a significant hazard ratio of 3.1 for current heavy smokers, compared with former smokers, even after adjusting for age, sex, and stress.

Furthermore, the hazard ratios for MDE among former-heavy smokers, compared with current smokers, steadily decreased over time since quitting. The hazard ratio dropped from 0.5 for those who quit between 1 and 5 years ago to 0.2 among those who quit smoking more than 21 years ago.

“Our findings are consistent with the view that the heavy smoking-to-major depression pathway is causal in nature, rather than mainly due to confounding by shared vulnerability factors,” noted Khaled and her colleagues.

Nevertheless, she said that “shared vulnerability factors including genetic vulnerability in the context of smoking and depression may not be limited to smoking initiation and heavy smoking onset, but may also influence the ability to quit smoking and maintain smoking cessation.”

Source: Journal of Psychiatric Research

Smoking photo by shutterstock.

Furthermore, use of nonmedical pharmaceuticals increased from 2.2 percent in 2002 to 3.9 percent in 2009. If these statistics continue to rise, it will lead to an epidemic in addiction among older Americans.

Depression and anxiety were cited as the top reasons for drug or alcohol abuse, according to a survey conducted by the Hanley Center, a drug and alcohol treatment and recovery center.

Economic and financial stress and retirement were reported as contributing factors as well. Almost half of the respondents named prescription drugs and alcohol as their substances of choice.

“Older adults face a distinct set of challenges as they enter their golden years,” said Dr. Barbara Krantz, medical director of Hanley Center. “This transitional period of life is unique and leads to difficulty in dealing with stressful situations, such as an early retirement or financial strains, which in turn may lead to serious anxiety and depression. Without the proper tools to manage their emotions, older adults turn to quick fixes such as alcohol and drugs, creating the perfect storm for dependency.”

The survey revealed the following facts:

• 40 percent of respondents consider themselves to be substance abusers after the age of 48;
• More than 90 percent of respondents named alcohol as one of the substances they abused;
• 49.5 percent of respondents reported prescription drug abuse;
• More than 40 percent of respondents said their families influenced their decision to seek treatment.

“We’ve made great strides by intervening on young people, but we continue to see an increase in boomers and seniors entering treatment,” said Krantz. “Many of these individuals have abused substances for a long time and that’s why they require a customized treatment plan.”

Source: Hanley Center

Man drinking alcohol photo by shutterstock.