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GENEVA,
July 28 (Xinhua) -- A team of Swiss researchers working with laboratory mice say
they have found a way to reverse the effects of cocaine on the brain, the
official Swissinfo website reported on Saturday.
The researchers from Geneva University claim that
their findings could lead to better treatments for drug addiction, which they
say affects an estimated 9 million people in Europe, according to the report.
The team focused on the part of the brain known to be
involved with pleasure and addictive drugs, succeeding in repressing hyperactive
cells charged up by cocaine.
Neuroscientist Christian Luscher, who led the study,
said it was the first time the mechanism needed to reverse the effects had been
identified.
"This is the piece of the puzzle that was not known
before -- the mechanism a cell uses to get back to normal," Luscher was quoted
by Swissinfo as saying.
According to Luscher, the research could one day make
it easier to treat addicts because scientists now know what needs to be done in
the brain to modify the effect of drug use.
He hopes the research will spur others to look at
drug addiction as a brain disease and target treatment and studies accordingly.
The study, published in the journal Science, builds
on Luscher's earlier research that identified the part of the brain where cells
become excited after cocaine use. The goal this time was to figure a way of
reversing the impact of cocaine on receptors in the brain.
Luscher and his team at Geneva University's
department of basic neurosciences targeted the receptors that go into overdrive
after cocaine use. They found that in order to correct the imbalance brought on
by cocaine they needed to replace the affected receptors with new ones.
To do this, they administered a short burst of
stimulation to another set of receptors to repress the hyper-charged cells.
"We have reversed the effect of cocaine and we show
how the machinery in the cells has to be engaged in order to be reversed," he
said.
