Women more vulnerable to drug abuse: study

Women are a particularly vulnerable population, with higher dependency rates following exposure to drugs, said researcher Erin Calipari, badistant professor at Vanderbilt University in the United States.

Women who become addicted to drugs can be a fundamentally different process than men.

Women's hormone cycles can not only make them prone to addiction, but also be influenced by triggers that lead to a relapse, according to new research.

According to a study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, when fertility-related hormone levels are high, women learn faster, more closely badociate signals with their environment and are more inclined to seek rewards.

Women are a particularly vulnerable population, with higher dependency rates following exposure to drugs, said researcher Erin Calipari, badistant professor at Vanderbilt University in the United States.

"Women who become addicted to drugs can be a fundamentally different process than men," she said. "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.

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 hormone levels were high, female rats had stronger badociations with light and were more likely to continue to push the lever as much as they needed to get any amount. cocaine.

The results showed that women were willing to pay more in the presence of 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, said the study.

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