Jornal de Alcoolismo e Dependência de Drogas
Acesso livre

Abstrato

Impact of Drug Abuse and Addiction in Daily Life: A Mini Review

Ram Kumar

Drug addiction involves potentially life-long behavioral abnormalities that are caused in vulnerable individuals by repeated exposure to a drug of abuse. The persistence of these behavioral changes suggests that long-lasting changes in gene expression, within particular regions of the brain, may contribute importantly to the addiction phenotype. Work over the past decade has demonstrated a crucial role for epigenetic mechanisms in driving lasting changes in gene expression in diverse tissues, including the brain. In this review article, we will be discussed the prevalence of drug addiction among high-school students and its association with violence and school behavior. The present study provides baseline data focusing specifically on the extent of the importance of early detection of drug addiction among vulnerable young people, enabling the development of educational programs to prevent abuse and dependence on substances due to drug addiction and violence. As will be seen, there is robust evidence that repeated exposure to drugs of abuse induces changes within the brain’s reward regions in three major modes of epigenetic regulation histone modifications such as acetylation and methylation, DNA methylation, and non-coding RNAs. In several instances, it has been possible to demonstrate directly the contribution of such epigenetic changes to addiction-related behavioral abnormalities. Studies of epigenetic mechanisms of addiction are also providing an unprecedented view of the range of genes and non-genic regions that are affected by repeated drug exposure and the precise molecular basis of that regulation.