Not only does your nasal septum disappear due to long-term cocaine use, your brain cells are also affected, causing your brain to age faster.
Addiction is primarily a brain disease. Whether it’s alcohol, gambling or hard drugs, in most cases the reward area in our brain is flooded with dopamine and that gives a pleasant feeling. You can also achieve that through good food, sex or even a fun hobby, but with drugs it goes faster and ten times harder.
Be sensible
In a healthy brain, the prefrontal cortex can make the trade-off between choosing a quick pleasure or putting it off because now is not the right time or place for it. You could think of the prefrontal cortex as the ‘sensible’ part of our brain. It is involved in functions such as planning, decision making, and impulse control. And it is precisely the latter that is disrupted in an addict’s brain, making it much more difficult to resist temptation.
The question is what exactly is different in the prefrontal cortex of people with an addiction. There are German and Canadian researchers there found out: it concerns the area Brodmann Area 9, precisely this part is important for self-awareness and impulse control. And it was precisely there that changes in so-called DNA methylation could be seen.
Methylering
Methylation is, as it were, switching pieces of DNA on and off, which changes the DNA structure. Every second our body carries out more than a billion methylation processes. One substance is converted into another. Think of toxins that are rendered harmless or, for example, hormones and neurotransmitters that are released and remain at the right level.
“Since DNA methylation is an important mechanism of regulation of gene expression, the observed changes in DNA methylation may contribute to functional changes in the brain and thereby give rise to the characteristic behavioral aspects of addiction,” said lead researcher Eric Poisel.
The biological age of cells
Because you can’t just look into brains, the study was conducted on 42 brains of male donors, half of whom were addicted to cocaine and the other half were not. This is an important advance, because previous research was done on rats.
What the scientists discovered was remarkable: They found evidence that the cells in Brodmann Area 9 were biologically older in the cobee addicts than in those without addiction. The aging of brain cells therefore went faster in them. Patterns of DNA methylation were used to determine the biological age in the brain region. The biological age of cells, tissues and organs may be higher or lower than the actual age. That depends, among other things, on diet, lifestyle, harmful environmental factors or diseases.
Addicts age faster
“We discovered a stronger biological aging of the brain in people with cocaine addiction compared to people without addiction. This can be caused by cocaine-related physical problems, such as inflammation or cell death,” said researcher Stephanie Witt. “But more research is needed with a larger number of subjects, because estimating biological age in addiction research is still very new and influenced by many factors.
About twenty deviations
The researchers also looked at differences in the degree of methylation at more than 650,000 sites in the human genome to see if there was a connection with whether or not the subject was addicted. They adjusted for factors such as age, other addictions and illnesses, such as depression.
In the end, seventeen regions in the genome remained that were more methylated in the addicts than in the donors who were not addicted. Three areas were less methylated in the coke addicts.
Just like with rats
“We were surprised that the changes in DNA methylation were especially prominent in genes that regulate neuron activity and the connection between them. Presumably, there are direct effects of these changes in DNA methylation on gene expression. We need to do more research on that,” said Poisel.
“It was also fascinating that the genes that showed the greatest changes in DNA methylation included two genes regulating cocaine behavior, which have been previously reported in experiments in rats,” Witt concludes.
Frequent cocaine use therefore causes permanent brain damage because certain parts of the prefrontal cortex age faster. Scientists will investigate the exact consequences of this.
