Computational Psychiatry & Addiction: Interview with Xiaosi Gu, Ph.D. | The Center for BrainHealth®

Описание: In 2015, Xiaosi Gu, Ph.D., joined the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas as the head of the Computational Psychiatry Unit. Dr. Gu explains more about her research and the advances made in computational psychiatry thus far.

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Transcript:

We know now, after decades of research that, drug addiction is really a brain disorder. It’s not as simple as a lack of will power or lack of control as people typically think about drug addicts. Scientists have found very specific brain mechanisms and substrates that are responsible for drug addiction. Drug addiction is a very serious issue for the whole society and it causes loss of money and loss of lives. So, we care about the basic research and scientific questions, but also we care a lot about clinical issues. Specifically we are talking about a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter involved in drug addiction, but also involved in everyday reward processing. Like, when you eat chocolate or when you listen to a nice concert. What we found that although the system is very robust it has a very consistent role in reward processing there are ways to twist it or to modify it. So, that really opens up behavioral types of treatments and interventions to modify or to change these abnormal dopamine activities. This line of result can be expanded, also, to look at depression, to look at ADHD, OCD, and many other psychiatric disorders.

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