May 25, 2001 -- Good things may come to those who
wait, but people who act impulsively simply can't wait for their
rewards, and settle for whatever they can get NOW. A new study
suggests that impulsive behavior -- a feature of addictions,
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and some personality
disorders, may be caused by a brain defect.
In the study, reported in the May 25 issue of the
journal Science, rats trained to understand that they can
have one sugar pellet now or four later soon catch on to the idea
that waiting can bring sweet rewards.
But when the same rats have damage to an area of the
brain called the nucleus accumbens, they appear to lose their
ability to make wise choices and always go for the quick and easy
fix, something like look-before-you-leap behavior, report Rudolf
Cardinal, PhD, and colleagues in the department of experimental
psychology at the University of Cambridge, England.
A naturally-occurring substance called dopamine may
help explain this phenomenon. Dopamine is one of the chemicals that
allow communication between nerves in the brain. It is also known to
be involved in the sensation of reward we experience from something
we enjoy. Cardinal tells WebMD it's been known for a long time that
natural rewards, like food and sex, as well as artificial ones, like
nicotine and cocaine, act on dopamine to activate the nucleus
accumbens.
The conclusion that the nucleus accumbens is at the
center of our reward system is bolstered by a second study published
in the May issue of the journal Neuron. In it, researchers
report that the regions of the brain -- including the nucleus
accumbens -- that become activated in the anticipation and
experience of winning at gambling, in a sense another type of
addictive, impulsive behavior, are the same regions that appear to
respond in cocaine addicts.
Hans Breiter, PhD, co-director of the Motivation and
Emotion Neuroscience Center in the department of radiology at
Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues used a high-power,
real-time brain imager to look at brain activity in 12 men taking
part in a computer-controlled game of chance.
The subjects were given a $50 stake and were told that
they could lose some or all of it, keep it, or increase it. The
volunteers were first shown how much they could win by watching
where the spinner landed on a wheel-of-fortune; this part of the
test was called the expectancy phase. In the second or "outcome"
phase, participants found whether they had actually lost or won.
The researchers found that as the prospect of winning
more money increased, so did activity in the parts of the brain
previously seen to respond to other types of rewards, such as drugs.
The level of activity in the nucleus accumbens and two other nearby
regions grew as the potential jackpot increased in the expectancy
phase, and similar changes were seen during the outcome phase.
A researcher who has studied the genetics of addictive
behaviors tells WebMD that certain people have genetic abnormalities
in their reward systems. The nucleus accumbens, he says, sits at the
center of the reward system when it's stimulated by gambling.
Defects in this system, "can lead not only to potential problems
with addictive behaviors but with impulsivity in general," like that
which occurs in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, says David
Comings, MD, director of medical genetics at City of Hope Medical
Center in Duarte, Calif.
Comings points out that the drug Zyban, which is
sometimes prescribed to help people quit smoking, is an
antidepressant that acts on dopamine in the brain, and that Ritalin,
widely prescribed for children with ADHD, also acts to normalize
dopamine levels. These observations are suggestive of an underlying
defect common to addiction, ADHD and other forms of impulsive
behavior.