Endocrine Abstracts

Drug addiction is a brain psychiatric disorder, whose etiology involves interaction of inherited predispositions and environmental factors. Addictive drugs share the properties of being self-administered by laboratory animals, and of activating the brain reward circuitry, which stems from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) where dopamine (DA) cells are located. These neurons are involved in neural processing contributing to drug addiction and DA plays a crucial role as learning ...