Addiction treatment hope through new research

Categories

Addiction Treatment
Alcohol
Drugs
Gambling
In the papers
On TV

News Archive

Home » News » Drugs » Addiction treatment hope through new research

by Change | 29 Apr 2009

Bookmark

E-mail

A new study looking at the way in which people respond to visual stimuli could help develop new addiction treatments for patients.

New ways of treating people with addiction problems could be developed thanks to a study concentrating on visual stimuli.

Researchers from the Universities of Sussex, Cambridge and Nottingham have found that addictive behaviour may be determined by conscious, rapid thought processes, rather than the content of visual stimuli as previously thought.

Professor Theodora Duka from the University of Sussex, who led the research, said: "We have shown that individuals only need to look at a cue representing the substance they are addicted to for a fleeting moment to want to act on it. This suggests that their actions are instead determined by conscious, rapid decision processes following the detection of a visual stimulus."

She added: "For example, instead of the sight of a pub triggering the addictive behaviour in an alcoholic, our research shows that the momentary sight of a pub leads the brain to make rapid, conscious decisions about going in for a drink, which is what the alcoholic values."

It is hoped the discovery could lead to new ways of providing addiction treatment to individuals in an effort to tackle their problems.

The findings follow recent research published in Biological Psychiatry, which studied the association between environments and the risk of a patient falling back into addiction.

Bookmark this: