LATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES, about ADDICTION and OTHER NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL SYNDROMES: 

EMMA is committed to divulge and to highlight discoveries on new therapeutic tools for disease of mind & metabolism (e.g., depression, mood disorders, psychoses, mental retardation, etc.) - BROWSE the section using "Prev" and "Next" buttons at footer of pages.

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"Nature" Editorials - Science has a gambling problem

Researchers and government agencies pay too little attention to pathological gambling...There is insufficient research on what can tip a gambler towards destructive addiction.This must change! PDF version

Disordered gambling is a major societal problem with high costs to the subjects involved. Animal models may help in understanding and preventing gambling-related problems. Data show that some (lab) animals may have gambling-like profiles, yet we need few additional steps towards models of disordered gambling. Read all

Wednesday, October 29, 2014 | Featured Article 

Rats switch to random mode when up against hard-to-beat competitors, and we should too

A study on rats, published in the journal Cell ...

Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty, by Shaul Shalvi and Carsten K.W. De Dreu : Full Text or PDF

 Read discoveries on Schizophrenia and Mental Retardation : unespected links ...

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  Adolescence appears to be a period of heightened propensity to develop addictions but the biological factors that increased vulnerability were not known. New research carried out in rats and published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides important clues. Relative to adults, adolescent rats took cocaine more readily, were more sensitive to lower doses, showed greater escalation of cocaine intake, and were less susceptible to increases in work they had to do to get the drug.

 Adolescent rats also showed increased activity of dopamine neurons, a feature known to be associated with increased drug self-administration behaviour. Dopamine is essential or drug-induced reward. The results highlight behavioural and biological markers of heightened addiction liability during adolescence

Wong et al. (2013) Adolescents Are More Vulnerable to Cocaine Addiction: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence. The Journal of Neuroscience, 33: 4913-4922

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Anselme P (2010 - link to DOI). The uncertainty processing theory of motivation. Behav Brain Res. 208: 291-310. Epub 2009 Dec 23.

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A Neuroeconomic Theory of Bidirectional Synaptic Plasticity and Addiction (2010) Med Hypotheses, 75: 356-358

Evaluation of animal models of neuro-behavioral disorders. By van der Staay FJ, Arndt SS, Nordquist RE. Behav Brain Funct. 2009 ; 5:11.

The effect of 5-HTT gene promoter polymorphism on impulsivity depends on family relations ...