A new study has found that the stimulant drug Ritalin could be used to cure cocaine addiction. CBS News reports that a single dose of ritalin, usually prescribed to treat ADHD, may in fact be able to restructure the ruptured nerve pathways of a coke addict’s brain.
“These findings may also be generalizable to other types of addiction,” study lead investigator Dr. Rita Goldstein, a professor in psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, told CBSNews.com.
According to a recent government report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), roughly 800,000 Americans over the age of 12 are addicted to cocaine.
Though it is far from the most popular drug in the U.S., Goldstein points out that it’s still one of the most dangerous.
“Cocaine addiction may not be number one in the charts, but it’s number one [among illicit drugs] in terms of emergency room visits,” she said. The aforementioned SAMHSA report said that cocaine was linked to nearly 423,000 ER visits in 2009, much more than marijuana, heroin and other popular stimulants.
Goldstein explained to CBS that when a person uses cocaine, the brain is flooded with dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls the brain’s responses to pleasure. When someone gets addicted to cocaine, the dopamine pathways that control how much of dopamine gets to our brain gets disrupted. This is what leads addicts to take the drug compulsively.
Ritalin, like cocaine, also targets these pathways.
For the study, researchers recruited 18 former coke addicts who are now healthy and not on any medications. They were given either a single 20 milligram pill of ritalin or a placebo and then had MRI brain scans to monitor the pill’s effect.
The researchers found that a single dose of ritalin successfully normalized the targeted pathways. This led Goldstein to theorize that the ritalin boosted the brain’s control over the impaired responses that influence us to take drugs compulsively.
The researchers cannot yet conclude that ritalin could be used to treat cocaine addiction because this was a brain imaging study, not a treatment study with actual cocaine addicts.
Future studies will look for more concrete results so that ritalin could be implemented in rehabilitation clinics for cocaine addicts.
Via CBS, Photo via Tumblr
