NROSCI 0081 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Drug Tolerance, Psychoactive Drug, Barbiturate
Document Summary
Addiction became thought of as a disease: helped many people, became more common and widely accepted. Consequently, all our research relies on this model and it its almost always treated medically. Risk factors for drug addiction: heritability, growing up in a family with a substance abusing parent, history of physical and emotional abuse, being with drug using peers, sociodemographic variables including: younger age, less education, non white ethnicity, lack of employment. A typical neuron is designed to: receive multiple inputs at the dendrites, either from another neuron via a neurotransmitter or from the environment (for example, when light activates neurons in the retina or something touches the skin). Send a message down the axon, but only if the integration of synaptic inputs at the soma reaches a certain threshold. Further safety and efficacy studies, dosage; 1000"s of patients; these clinical trials are typically double-blinded and placebo- controlled.
