Addiction’s Common Ground: A Universal Brain Circuit Revealed

IT’S COMPLICATED –

Sept. 25, 2023 – One limitation to the study is because the data came from previous studies and the findings are correlative, the authors could not conclude causation. Stubbs also noted there are many ways to look at brain imaging, which makes looking at the data more complicated.

Fox said that despite the extensive data points, narrowing down a specific circuit fills in a gap from previous studies done in the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics, bringing targeted neurostimulation to treat addiction, like transcranial magnetic stimulation, closer to patients in a clinical setting.

“This study connects our previous work on lesions that stopped addiction to the last 50 years of research on neuroimaging abnormalities in patents with addiction,” Fox said.

Joseph Taylor, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist and clinical director of transcranial magnetic stimulation at the CBCT, and a co-author of the paper, said that unification is a huge step in the field of brain circuit therapeutics.

“This convergence boosts our confidence that we are starting to understand the circuitry of substance use disorders,” Taylor said.