Appetite for Food May Keep Drug Cravings in Check

A paper just published online in the top journal Nature Neuroscience shows that the brains of mice cannot support the activation of neural pathways coding for hunger and drug addiction at the same time. Basically, the rodents prefer either getting fat, or getting high.

Moving past the fact that you need an … original mind to plan such a study, researchers at the Yale University set up an experiment in which they monitored the neural activation patterns in mice.

They found that rodents that featured more activation in neural pathways controlling hunger and appetite were less interested in consuming cocaine, or in other novelty-seeking behaviors. Mice that showed less activation in these areas were more likely to try out cocaine.

The new research “indicates that a set of people who have no interest in food might be more prone to drug addiction,” the investigators explain, quoted by PsychCentral.