“Drugs of abuse hijack a mesolimbic pathway that processes homeostatic need” in Science
We are excited to share that our paper entitled "Drugs of abuse hijack a mesolimbic pathway that processes homeostatic need" has been published in Science.Drugs of abuse produce pleasurable feelings and reinforce consummatory behavior directed toward their acquisition. These same properties are characteristic of natural rewards that satisfy innate needs, such as food or water. Decades of research has shown that brain systems processing natural rewards are also impacted by drugs of abuse at the physiological, circuit, cellular, and molecular levels. These findings raise the hypothesis that drugs of abuse cause addiction by “hijacking” a common reward pathway, ultimately promoting drug intake while curbing other healthy goals. However, the specific neural substrates for such a shared reward pathway remain unidentified.In this paper we identified the nucleus accumbens (NAc) as a…