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Smoking Addiction Mapped to Specific Region of Brain
Smoking tobacco is the most preventable cause of death and disease in the developed world. Cigarettes are so addictive that despite these risks, it can be physically and emotionally difficult (or impossible) to quit. The addiction is thought to result from changes in the brain that, in response to certain environmental or emotional cues, lead to the urge for a cigarette.
Antoine Bechara, Ph.D. and colleagues from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, are actively studying this aspect of smoking behavior. In the January 26, 2007 issue of the journal Science, they published a novel finding that a region of the brain called the insula is the dominant player in the complex behavior of cigarette addiction. The group studied a group of 19 smokers that experienced brain damage that involved the insula and a control group of 50 smokers with non-insula brain damage.
Many of the patients in this study, with both insula and non-insula brain damage, quit smoking for various reasons. However, only damage to the insula was highly correlated with a cessation of the actual addiction to smoking. A patient only qualified for “disruption of the addiction to smoking” if he met all of the following criteria: i) quit smoking less than one day after onset of brain trauma, ii) did not start smoking after quitting, iii) felt that quitting was easy, and iv) had no urges to smoke again. The researchers found that patients with damage to the insula were significantly more likely to experience a disruption in the smoking addiction when compared to the remaining brain trauma patients (Naqvi et al. 2007 Science 315).
The authors state that current dogma suggests that the insula is responsible for our conscious ability to anticipate the physical effects of emotional events, and it has therefore been connected with addictive behavior. This study suggests that the insula is a necessary neurological factor in the complex behavior of nicotine addiction, making the insula region of the brain a possible target for both drug-based smoking cessation therapy and the monitoring of current therapies.
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