Impulsivity Linked to Cocaine Addiction

"Call it the chicken-and-egg debate of the addiction world: Cocaine addicts are known for being frenetic, but which came first, the behavior or the habit?"
New studies (made with rats) proved that is the behavior what makes somone addict.
Experts think that this might help later for solving problems with addictions.
Scientists study frug addcits when they already have an addiction, so it's hard to know if their behavior took led them more to the addiction.
"What they do know is that two traits--impulsiveness and thrill-seeking--tend to define most drug addicts. Although the behaviors are similar, scientists have been able to parse them in the lab: Highly impulsive rats jump the gun on simple tasks--pushing a button, for example, before they are signaled to do so; thrill-seeking rats, meanwhile, will rapidly explore any new environment--immediately sniffing various objects in a new cage, for example--whereas normal rats would wait until they felt comfortable in their surroundings. "
What this says, is that the behavior can change the results. For example, if the rat had an impulsive mood or temper, then they could be more likely to have an addiction.
Some other studies that the scientists did, was to put a kind of disspenser to the rats, they put it so they could take cocaine when ever they wanted too. The impulsive rats weren't fast to turn to the drug, but when they did they took it in small amounts.
"After 40 days of free access to cocaine, however, the impulsive rats were the ones who became the addicts. They were unable to stop taking cocaine even when it meant getting an electric shock, the team reports. The thrill seekers, meanwhile, had lost interest in the drug; apparently, the thrill was gone"
So this proves that the impulsive rats were the one who became the addicts, and it didn't matter for them if there were consecuences about keep taking them.
So this also shows that there is a connection between impulsive people and drug addcits, well, rat drug addicts at least.
A psychopharmacologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. Marc Potenza, a psychiatrist at Yale University, believes that the research has important implications for treating drug dependence. "We might be able to identify individuals at early times in their lives that may be prone to developing addiction," he says.

I think this is something that will really help for predicting which kind of people would be more likely to have an addiction, and is a kind of prediction too, a way of prevention, if people know that being an impulsive person leads more to have an addiction, then all the poeple can be informed about this, and maybe parents, or friends from people that are impulsive can help them so know about the problem, it can really be a way of helping all this people to know if someone can become an addictict but also to help them to prevent it.
So every time, science is more amazing, because almost all of the blogs that I've done, are of things that I don't ever think about can be posible, not knowing how a person's mood can really affect a situation, so I really like knowing about this, becuase it's a way that you know more about facts that seem that doesn't matter but that at the end they really do.


by: Marcela Murillo Trujano