Pain and Addiction
Drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing medical illness. Chronic pain affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide with little available to help. Although pain and addiction may seem unrelated, there is good scientific evidence that chronic pain and drug addiction involve the same brain mechanisms. Which is why so many drugs that are abused have analgesic properties (nicotine, heroin, cocaine and cannabinoids) and why many of the analgesics commonly used to treat pain have abuse potential (opioids).
Addictive drugs and those used to control pain also prompt tolerance: more and more of the drug is required to achieve the original effect. In addiction, this problems is particularly acute because addicts report that they ultimately need to take the drug to feel normal or avoid feeling bad. Extensive research has shown trauma, infection or inflammation all cause adaptive changes in the way that neurons and neural circuits behave. In some people, these changes are maladaptive and cause chronic pain or the chronic, drug-craving, remission and relapse that characterize addiction. The goal of this program is to develop a comprehensive model of the neural systems that cause these neural changes. A multidisciplinary group of Stanford scientists, working together, will investigate these questions on genetic, molecular, cellular, circuit-level, behavioral and epidemiologic levels. The ultimate aim of this program is to translate these research findings into more effective and tailored treatments for pain and addiction, and into early therapeutic interventions that will prevent these disorders.
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