( Medicationagainst nicotine addiction ...)Controversial drug shown to act on brain protein to cut alcohol use

Medication against nicotine addiction is nowadays readily available. However, a similar and equally dangerous addiction, alcoholism, can't yet be controlled by drugs. Or can it be? Researchers from the University of California in San Diego identified a natural compound able to block alcohol addiction in rodents. We can only hope that anti-alcoholism patchs or gum will be available in a close future; it would help fix a problem that we've been struggling with for ages. A naturally occurring hallucinogen advocated by some clinicians as a potent anti-addiction drug has been rigorously studied for the first time, confirming its ability to block alcohol craving in rodents, and clarifying how it works in the brain. The new research findings about the drug Ibogaine open the way for development of other drugs to reverse addiction without Ibogaine's side effects, potentially adding to the small arsenal of drugs that effectively combat addiction.

Derived from a West African shrub, Ibogaine has been championed for years by a cadre of clinicians and drug treatment advocates impressed with its ability to reverse withdrawal symptoms and craving for alcohol and various drugs of abuse. It has been used outside of the U.S. to treat addiction by American and other clinicians. But its side effects, including hallucinations, which made it popular in the 1960s drug culture, and evidence of toxicity to certain nerve cells in rodent studies have discouraged careful studies of its clinical potential against drug and alcohol addiction. The FDA has not approved use of Ibogaine in the U.S. Scientists at UCSF's Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center have now shown definitively in experiments with mice and rats that Ibogaine does reduce alcohol consumption, and they have determined that it does so by increasing the level of a brain protein known as glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, or GDNF. In a separate study, they demonstrated that G
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Source:University of California, San Francisco

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