http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/health/drug-addiction-as-a-developmental-disorder.html
This article that I came across was centered on the development of drug addiction in teenagers. Dr. Chambers of Yale School of Medicine was in lead of a project that took into the account the findings of 140+ studies on drug addiction in teens. They found that addictive drugs stimulated brain parts that had undergone rapid change causing a possible neural imbalance. This imbalance would be a benefiting factor in the impulsive and unwise decisions that teens commonly make. They reported that these studies have also caused a shift of belief as to what constitutes a venerability risk in developing serious drug addiction. It has been commonly argued that using drugs at a young age would greatly increase the likelihood of addiction in adulthood. With the new data taken into account, it was seen that vulnerability was positively correlated with the brains developmental changes after puberty and into adulthood. This shift in developmental speed impacts teens brain functioning causing them to be drawn to new activities and experiences much more readily and ferociously which is called "the expansion of their motivational repertory" according to Dr. Chambers. In addition, the motivational circuitry of the brain is growing and establishing its roots within the developing brain. The motivational circuitry is concerned with the brains interpretation of how desirable a experience or act is. These systems are dependent on the release of dopamine in the brain.
Basically the take away from this article was that as a person matures out of adolescence into adulthood, the brain is constantly getting bigger, developing, and experiencing new things. It is at this time that the brain is in a extremely vulnerable position of influence by outside forces. It is now being suggested that past thought is flawed in thinking that use of a drug in childhood ensures a predisposition of developing addiction at a later age. Teens exposed to certain experiences when their brains are in a state of flux provides more of a chance of developing addiction. The brain's dopamine patterns have the potential to make a experience with a drug a very powerful and desirable feeling. I feel as if this is something that cannot really be screened or tested for predicatively and is something that would be probable to happen if the brain was expanding and reorganizing at a disproportionate pace.
I think that by using drugs in our adolescence, you are able to experience whatever that drugs side effect is and remember it later on in life when things get more stressful. I think that in adolescence it is easier to to be tempted into trying drugs than in later adulthood. I believe that this experimentation early on in life could worsen the chances of drug abuse later in life if you were predisposed from genetics.
ReplyDeleteTalking about drug addiction is a very hard topic for me, because I have a long history of it in my family. My dad suffered from drug addiction in his early teens and the only way he was able to fight through it was by joining the military to get his life together. It was at that point he met my mother and started a family. Once out of the military he fell back into his old habits. I do not think that his brain changed when moving from adolescence into adulthood. I think that he remembered the positive aspects of taking the drugs and that caused him to relapse.
I think that if he didn't try drugs in his adolescence, he wouldn't be as he is now. I just think that adolescence is a gateway for risky behaviors that you are genetically predisposed to. You don't practice them because you are predisposed, but once you try them it makes it harder to stop, even in adulthood.