Fecal transplants in mice reduce nicotine withdrawal symptoms, showing fewer somatic signs and anxiety-like behaviors for up to a week. Glad I quit smoking already and don't need to try this ;-) @damajlab.bsky.social pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41874416/

Why female-specific research is critical to understand addiction?

Encouraging news about GLP1 and depression, anxiety, addiction. In 100,000+ Swedish cohort, Semaglutide and liraglutide lower the risk of worsening mental illness in diabetes patients with depression/anxiety/addiction.

A ketogenic diet alters alcohol metabolism in rats, showing 2-3x higher blood alcohol levels and a 20% reduction in alcohol dehydrogenase 1 protein in the liver.

The sky is the limit in bioengineering, just like an airplane's black box, this newly synthetic protein logs a timeline of biological signals within a single cell so that we can reconstruct the cell's history after the fact. this is completely surreal.

Very nice research Highlight in @npp_journal by Alex Kawa and the great Terry Robinson on our recent paper. This one feels extra special to me.

First head-to-head comparison of GR antagonism on alcohol vs opioid withdrawal with both male and females show that GR antagonist reduces alcohol and heroin withdrawal-induced hyperalgesia in both sex. These results parallel those found with CRF1 antagonists.

A beast of a paper from @byl015 @ucsandiego.bsky.social, dissecting the role of PFC interneurons (PV, SOM, VIP) controlling cocaine seeking. Normally, the PFC inhibits VTA DA neurons via a local GABA interneuron. Classic inhibitory role of the PFC over subcortical regions.

Impressive results from an exome study identifying gene variants in the beta 3 nicotinic receptor subunit that leads to an 80% reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked (not whether you will ever smoke) in East Asian and indigenous Mexican.

TRDRP just announced it’s moving away from investigator-initiated grants toward themed, programmatic calls.

This one hit close to home for me. A study of 500+ smokers showed that people with low self-efficacy benefited less from standard treatments and, in some cases, were even less likely to quit after treatment.

GLP-1R agonists decrease sexual behavior in female rats and mice, though the effects differ depending on the drug and species (expected). Regardless of the reward or behavior (food, alcohol, drugs, sex), GLP1 agonists are proving to be very general motivational repressors.

If, like me, the new biosketch website pissed you off. If HTML tags and constant PDF downloads to see the formatting drive you crazy when editing your NIH/NSF biosketch, try this.

Interesting new result: in a model of fear/stress/ptsd, second-order conditioning cue (SOC in the figure) that was never directly linked to danger being absent still reduced fear just as much as a true safety signal (S), as long as it is immediately preceding the safety cue.

Couldn’t agree more! We need to 10x polysubstance use research funding. We actually need whole research centers dedicated to basic research on polysubstance use. Right now they are almost all exclusively dedicated to a single substance.https://t.co/y4bmFOZ2YU

Very happy to share a new paper in @npp-journal.bsky.social I thought I knew what would predict escalation of cocaine use. Well, I was wrong. After tracking behavior daily for weeks, the answer turned out to be the opposite of my prediction, and it changed how I see addiction.

Could your initial response to a painkiller reveal your future risk of addiction? Excited to share our new paper where we conducted a massive behavioral screening to understand the behavioral patterns underlying addiction-like behaviors in rats and how they relate to each others A quick thread 👇

#ThisWeekInNPP Behavioral indices of incentive salience, not sensitization or tolerance, were highly predictive of escalation of cocaine self-admin, suggesting incentive salience as a critical behavioral indicator of vulnerability to cocaine use

Breaking initial resistance to incentive salience with sufficient drug exposure Individuals initially resistant to incentive salience can, with sufficient exposure, become sensitized and escalate cocaine use to the same level as more susceptible individuals www.nature.com/articles/s41...