New research suggests that blood pressure medicine that could treat drug and alcohol addiction, UPI reported.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that the antihypertensive drug called isradipine prevented relapses by erasing the unconscious memories that underlie addiction in a rat test.
"Many addicts want to quit, but their brains are already conditioned. This drug might help the addicted brain become de-addicted,"Hitoshi Morikawa, who led the study, said in a statement.
For the study, researchers trained rats to associate either a black or white room with the use of a drug, State-Column reported. Then the addicted rats were offered the choice of going into either room, they nearly always chose the room they associated with their addiction.
In the next phase of the study, researchers gave the addicted rats a high dose of isradipine before the rats made their room choices. Although rats still preferred the room they associated with their addiction on that day, they no longer showed a preference for it on subsequent days, suggesting that the addiction memories were not just suppressed but had gone away entirely.
"The isradipine erased memories that led them to associate a certain room with cocaine or alcohol," Morikawa said.
Addictive drugs, such as cocaine, are thought to rewire brain circuits involved in "reward learning, forming powerful memories of drug-related cues," while blood pressure medicine block a particular type of ion channel, which is expressed not only in heart and blood vessels but also in certain brain cells.
Based on their findings researchers concluded that using using isradipine to block certain channels also "appeared to reverse the habits of addiction that become hardwired in the brain," UPI reported.
The medication used in the experiment is a drug already labeled safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The findings are detailed in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
