Addiction and the Adolescent Brain Flashcards
What is drug abuse?
(Alternate definition) Drug abuse is any use of illegal drugs or the inappropriate use of legal substances to produce pleasure, ease stress, or escape reality (or all three)
What are the 4 characteristics that are signs of drug abuse?
- Is the drug causing the person to have problems at school, work, or home?
- Is drug use causing the person to do things that are risky or dangerous?
- Is the person having problems with the law because of drug use?
- Is the person having trouble dealing with other people, including family and friends because of drug use?
How are you diagnosed with drug abuse?
If you have any 1 of the following four conditions about your drug use in a one year time period.
What is drug addiction?
(Alternate definition) Drug addiction is the continuing, compulsive use of drugs in spite of negative health, legal, or social consequences.
What are the seven characteristics of drug addiction?
- Tolerance
- Withdrawal
- Using larger amounts of drug for longer time
- Repeatedly trying to cut down or stop using the drug
- Spending most of the time trying to get more of the drug
- Spending less time in social, fun, school, or work activities
- Continuing to use drugs even though the user knows that drugs are causing problems in life.
How do drugs affect the brain?
Brain activity: baseline activity is severely lower of an addict
Dopamine levels: drugs change how dopamine is transmitted, strongly stimulates dopamine
Gene activity: change the activity
Etc:
How do people respond to increased levels of dopamine, and how does it work within the reward center of the brain?
Drugs turn on the reward system and make people want to keep using them. Dopamine changes social interaction, and induce cravings that release dopamine when you see or think about the drug
Understand PET scan imaging of the brain, and how does activity change after one use, as well as months after the last use of a drug. Are changes permanent?
In one use, the brain has much less activity than beforehand, and throughout months it just gets worse. The brain then cannot naturally release dopamine. It takes over 100 days to recover.
What do the results show from a microarray analysis after withdrawal?
They show that the activity of genes changes after withdrawal.
Why is addiction is classified as a brain disease?
Drugs change how dopamine is transmitted and the levels/ activities of genes, and activity of the brain.
Understand the changes naturally occurring in the adolescent brain, and how drug use changes these developmental processes (including myelination, synaptic pruning, and frontal lobe development)
Hippocampus shrinks, myelination, synaptic pruning, mood, spatial skills, frontal lobe, white matter- off (myleination)
What are the risks associated with adolescents not getting sleepy when drinking?
This means adolescents will drink more and for a longer period of time, which could cause them to overdose on alcohol
How does alcohol affect the hippocampus?
The hippocampus is involved with memory and learning. Alcohol damages this structure which then affects memory and ability to learn.
Know how to interpret both graphs from your Lesson 3 handout
The first graph shows how adolescents were more addicted than adults.
The second graph shows that rats that were exposed younger were more addicted in adulthood, and have a higher chance of becoming addicted
What are options for treatment and the main ideas from lesson 4?
Medicine, rehab, but there isn’t a cure. 1/3 of people fully recover, 1/3 partially recover, and 1/3 don’t improve at all. Many people experience relapse.
