It’s possible that if semaglutide does not regulate addictive behaviour in everyone, it might help with more compulsive behaviours such as nail-biting or skin-picking. Questions of course remain about the long-term effects of taking semaglutide – some dieters have found that when they stop taking it, the weight comes back.
Cortex
Another approach to treating addictive behaviours such as smoking is being taken by UK scientists researching the addiction mechanism. Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Warwick in the UK and Fudan University in China scanned the brains of 800 people at the ages of 14, 19 and 24 and looked for any impact of smoking. They found that smokers appeared to have a smaller left ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain sometimes linked to will-power and behaviour control.
“There was a reduction in brain grey matter volume in the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex which likely causes impulsive behaviour and rule breaking that leads to the initiation of cigarette smoking,” says study author Prof Barbara Sahakian. “Cigarette smoking leads to reductions in brain grey matter volume in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with sensation seeking and pleasurable experiences that reinforces and maintains future cigarette smoking. This eventually leads to addiction.”
“Smoking is perhaps the most common addictive behaviour in the world, and a leading cause of adult mortality,” said Prof Trevor Robbins, co-senior author from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
“The initiation of a smoking habit is most likely to occur during adolescence. Any way of detecting an increased chance of this, so we can target interventions, could help save millions of lives.”
Annual deaths from cigarettes are expected to reach eight million worldwide by the end of the decade. Currently, one in five adult deaths each year are attributed to smoking in the US alone.
The study, published in Nature Communications, looked at links between brain changes and use of nicotine in tobacco, or in e-cigarettes. If this leads to a better understanding of the neurological mechanism underpinning addiction, it suggests routes towards treatment, such as drugs to prevent “brain shrinking” or to keep the frontal lobe working normally. An alternative might be a form of electrical stimulus to target this region of the brain as a potential treatment for addiction.
See also: Swimmer’s Ear and Treatment for Adults and Children
