New Technologies, Insight Offer Promise
In Treatment of Brain Disease, Addictions

Greater understanding of how the brain works has transformed treatment of mental illness and substance abuse, and begun to transform public perceptions of those diseases.

"We have begun to understand mental phenomena in many different ways," said Alan I. Leshner, CEO of AAAS and former director of the National Institute for Drug Abuse.

Using visual images and graphs, Leshner demonstrated the tremendous impact of drug use on learning and on memory, and the role of triggers in setting off the phenomenon of craving. "We can see how drug use changes the brain," Leshner said, adding that the use of drugs "usurps the brain's motivational priorities."

"Not only does using drugs substitute one motivation for another, it rearranges those priorities," said Leshner.

A new field of "neuroinformatics," which uses a computer-based system to collate information and analyze data, offers promising ways of evaluating the impact of drugs on diseases that affect the brain.

High-resolution, 3-D MRI images of mice brains that allow views of all three dimensions simultaneously are being used to test for "the most drugable genes," said Floyd Bloom, president of AAAS and former editor of Science magazine. "The computer knows where every nucleus and every cell type is." Depression, Alzheimer's disease chronic pain and epilepsy are among the conditions for which researchers hope to find better treatment, Bloom said.

For more information on the topics addressed at the seminar, "Human Health Frontiers," see the links below:

Smallpox
Stem Cells
Nutrition and Disease Prevention
Microbes

—Coimbra Sirica

16 October 2002

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