Hormonal cycles can make women more prone to addiction and higher relapse rates

The hormonal cycles of women can not only make them more prone to addiction, but also be more affected by the triggers that lead to relapse, revealed a new study from Vanderbilt University. The results are particularly significant because there are virtually no studies on substance abuse in women that explain these cycles.

Erin Calipari, badistant professor of pharmacology at the Vanderbilt Addiction Research Center, points out that women are a particularly vulnerable population, with higher dependency rates after drug exposure, but addiction studies have focused primarily on on the mechanisms underlying these effects in men. Her study found that when fertility-related hormone levels are high, women learn faster, badociate more closely with the signals of their environment and are more inclined to seek rewards.

"Women who develop a drug addiction can be a fundamentally different process than men," Calipari said. "It's important to understand this because it's the first step in developing truly effective treatments."

The next step, she said, would be to understand how hormonal changes affect women's brains and, ultimately, to develop drugs that could help replace them. But long before these drugs were available, treatment centers could use the information in this study to inform women of their stronger mental connections with places and objects. This can mean a higher risk of relapse simply by visiting for example a place where they have been using drugs or by taking the kind of spoon that they used during the process.

Researchers have historically avoided using female animals as part of medical studies so as not to have to account for the influences of hormonal cycles. As a result, drug development often focuses on correcting dysfunctions in men, which may explain why women often do not respond to available medications or treatments in the same way as men, said Calipari.

His work has been published recently in the journal affiliated with Nature. neuropsychopharmacology in an article entitled "Signals play a vital role in strengthening cocaine reinforcement according to the estrous cycle".

In this study, male and female rats were allowed to dose cocaine by pushing a lever, with a light configured to light during dosing. This sounds like environmental cues, such as drug addiction, present when humans take drugs. When their circulating hormone levels were high, female rats were more badociated with light and were more likely to continue to push the lever as much as needed to get it anyway. how much cocaine.

In the end, women were willing to "pay" more for these signals to obtain cocaine. The results are transferable to humans through a behavioral economic badysis, which uses a complex mathematical equation with values ​​for the most and the least that a subject can do to obtain a gain. This is one of the few ways to compare species.

"We found that animals would rely on a lever only to get light, these environmental stimuli," Calipari said. "It has value for them.

"Some epidemiological data indicate that women are more vulnerable, but we do not know exactly what the factors are, we know that they are rapidly moving to addiction and have more problems with thirst and relapse. such research, we begin to isolate the physiological causes. "

This new research builds on previous work published by Calipari at Mount Sinai Medical School Icahn, which showed that estrogen intensified the dopaminergic reward of the brain for cocaine use.