Hope for alcoholism cure as scientists discover brain circuit that controls compulsive drinking in mice

Abrain circuit that controls the compulsive drinking of alcohol has been discovered in mice, offering a hope of one day finding a cure for alcoholism in humans. Scientists have long sought to understand why some people are prone to develop drinking problems while others are not.

The team’s discovery in mice, if translated to humans, may provide doctors a way to reveal whether someone is likely to become a compulsive drinking later in life. Alcoholism is a chronic brain disease in which an individual drinks compulsively — often accompanied by negative emotions.

Whereas previous studies have focused on examining the brain after a drinking disorder develops, the researchers from the Salk Institute in California set out to prove that brain circuits can make some people more likely to be alcoholics.

“We’ve found for the first time a brain circuit that can accurately predict which mice will develop compulsive drinking — weeks before the behaviour starts,” said lead researcher and neuroscientist Kay Tye.

“This research bridges the gap between circuit analysis and alcohol/addiction research, and provides a first glimpse at how representations of compulsive drinking develop across time in the brain.”

“We initially sought to understand how the brain is altered by binge drinking to drive compulsive alcohol consumption,” said paper author and pharmacologist Cody Siciliano of the Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

“In the process, we stumbled across a surprising finding where we were actually able to predict which animals would become compulsive based on neutral activity during the very first time they drank.”

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Science.

The researchers created a test — known as a ‘binge-induced compulsion task’ — to examine how susceptibility towards alcohol consumption interacts with experience to produce compulsive drinking in mice.

They observed that mice could be sorted into three groups, that of low drinkers, high drinkers and compulsive drinkers.

Unlike the first two groups, the compulsive drinkers showed an insensitivity to negative consequences.

The scientists then used a special imaging technique to chart the nature of the cells and brain regions of interest before, during and after drinking.