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Women are more exposed to drug addiction: study & nbsp | & nbspPhoto: & nbspGetty Images
Washington: One study found that women's hormone cycles can not only make them more prone to addiction, but also make them more sensitive to triggers that lead to relapse. The research is important as there are virtually no studies on women's addiction that explain these cycles, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University in the United States.
They point out that women are a particularly vulnerable population, with higher dependency rates following drug exposure, but addiction studies have focused primarily on the mechanisms underlying these effects in men.
The study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology showed 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," said Erin Calipari, badistant professor at Vanderbilt University.
"It's important to understand this because it's the first step in developing truly effective treatments," Calipari said.
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.
However, long before these drugs are 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.
For the study, male and female rats were allowed to dose themselves with cocaine by pushing a lever, with a light configured to light during dosing.
This is similar to environmental cues, such as drug accessories, present when humans take medication.
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.
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