Cocaine use for recreational purposes is still a huge problem in the United States, with approximately 2 million Americans using the drug on a regular basis. It is also one of the most addictive of the recreational drugs in use today and even those who have spent numerous months at an inpatient rehab often fall back into the habit as soon as they are returned to the “outside world.”

Cocaine use causes both severe physical and mental damage and the desire for the drug can be so strong that people will go to extraordinary, often criminal lengths to obtain their next fix.

Now a group of researchers from the University of Missouri are working with computational models to undertake the study of how the human brain’s chemicals and synapse mechanisms – the connections between neurons – are affected by long term cocaine use and addiction, in the hope that future treatments can be more successful in curing a cocaine user’s addiction as a result of their work.

The lead researchers on the project are Ashwin Mohan and Sandeep Pendyam, both doctoral students in the University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. According to Pendyam “With cocaine addiction, addicts don’t feel an urge to revolt because there is a strong connection in the brain from the decision-making center to the pleasure center, which overwhelms other normal rewards and is why they keep seeking it,”. Their computational models he says will target exactly which signals in the brain react with the pleasure center triggering that process.

The chemical that is most usually released as a result of synaptic connections in the brain is Glutamate. Using their new model Mohan, Pendyam and their colleagues were able to conclude that there is an excessive amount of the chemical produced by the cocaine addicted brain in its pleasure center making the brains mechanisms incapable of regulating themselves properly and actually resulting in permanent damage. This would appear to make cocaine addiction as much of a disease as any other.

According to Mohan their model showed that “the glutamate transporters, a protein present around these connections that remove glutamate, are almost 40 percent less functional after chronic cocaine usage,” This damage, he says, is far from temporary. It appears that in the case of cocaine addicts the structure of the brain itself is permanently altered.

This new knowledge should now help those involved in the treatment of cocaine addicts develop more effective therapies and treatments that will offer a addicts a chance at a more permanent sobriety than ever before.