THE brain cells responsible for triggering cravings in recovering drug addicts have been identified.”Most research on addiction focuses on what happens when people take drugs,” says Danny Winder, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “This is among the first to look at what happens during relapse, which is the period that is most difficult to treat.”
To study the conditions that trigger a relapse, Mark West’s team at Rutgers University in New Jersey trained rats to press a lever to receive cocaine, but only when a specific tone was sounded. The rats came to associate hearing the tone…
