There are people who start smoking or drinking at one point in their lives and after a short time they can quit, apparently without much effort. However, others, among which you may find yourself, develop faster, and even for life in many cases, an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. Discovering the reason for this difference has been the main reason that has led a group of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to carry out a study with surprising results.
Apparently, the differences between the predisposition to abuse or addiction to these and other substances in people could be due to the underlying genetic differences of each one, which thanks to this work published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, have been able to know more thoroughly with the ultimate goal of being able to develop therapies against this type of dependency in the future.
The habitual consumption of these legal substances can lead to serious health problems, such as lung cancer, mental illness or liver damage. However, there are still not enough treatments for substance use disorder, which makes it difficult to overcome the situation on one’s own.
Genes related to alcohol and tobacco use
The tests were carried out with a new type of computational tool called MAGMA coupled to Hi-C (H-MAGMA) that was capable of analyzing the entire genome of the participants, and compared the resulting sequences with the levels of addiction of each one of them to draw the conclusions.
The authors located the genes related to drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and found that they were overrepresented in some types of neurons in people more prone to substance dependence. In addition, they observed that the genes underlying smoking were related to the perception of pain, the response to food and the abuse of other drugs such as cocaine.
“Antipsychotics and other mood stabilizers could provide therapeutic relief for people struggling with substance abuse”
“Our analyzes showed that the expression of genes shared between smoking and alcohol consumption can be altered by other types of substances such as cocaine. By characterizing the biological function of these genes, we will be able to identify the biological mechanisms underlying addiction, which could be generalized to various forms of substance use disorder,” said Hyejung Won, one of the authors of the research.
Genes were also found to be associated with alcohol consumption, which in turn were related to stress and learning, as well as the abuse of other drugs, such as morphine. In addition to the various types of excitatory neurons, they identified additional cell types, including cortical glutamatergic, midbrain dopaminergic, GABAergic, and serotonergic neurons that are associated with risk genes.
“We found that antipsychotics and other mood stabilizers could provide therapeutic relief for people struggling with substance abuse. And we are confident that our research provides a good foundation for research focused on creating better treatments to address drug dependence,” said Nancy Sey, lead author of the study.
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