How do addictive drugs hijack the brain's reward system? This review speculates how normal, physiological reward processes may be affected by addictive drugs. Addictive drugs affect acute responses and plasticity in dopamine neurons and postsynaptic structures. These effects reduce reward discrimination, increase the effects of reward prediction error signals, and enhance neuronal responses to ...

It is suggested that addictive behaviour, so called, ®ts into a psychological resource model. In other words, the habits in question are acquired because they serve a useful function for the individual, and the nature of the functions they ful®l is related to the personality pro®le of the `addict'. For some people this resource function develops into a form of addiction, and it is suggested tha...

Compulsive drug-taking behavior develops in vulnerable individuals who ingest substances that activate the reward system. This intense activation produces learned associations to cues that predict drug availability. With repetition the reward system becomes reflexively activated by cues alone, leading to a drive toward drug-taking. The central nervous system changes underlying this conditioned ...

In a recent article (1), Dr. Rippe highlights that lifestyle medicine practitioners need to ground their recommendations on sound scientific evidence and that this is complicated by the fact that scientific information is often distorted and conjecture is sometimes confused with proof. This includes, for example, that associations between variables found in crosssectional studies are presented ...