by Bruce Wilson
Two items crossed my attention this week, both of them related to addiction.
The first was a WSJ article about a study looking at the adolescent brain: “Are Some Teenagers Wired for Addiction?” Using fMRI, the researchers identified a particular pattern of neural activity in teens who had a tendency to become addicted to drugs or alcohol. Specifically, these teens had lower activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region that mediates impulsive behavior. (More on the OFC in a future post.) The implication is that faulty OFC activity causes poor impulse control which in turn causes kids to become easily addicted. A different pattern of faulty networks was found in kids with ADHD, also related to impulse control. In other words, the brain is the problem.
Continue reading “Addiction: It’s Not about the Brain”
