Addiction is a very persistent behavior which leads to the loss of control over
one's life. The biggest problem is that it's also a very rigid strategy to
cope with stress, with anxiety, with difficult emotions. So people who are
addicted don't develop other more adaptive strategies to cope with their
life problems, different issues and they stick to this very one problematic
behavior which overwhelms all other significant life areas, destroys their
families, destroys their significant relations, friendships, professional life,
education, and passions. Every year there is about 11 percent of population
who suffer from different addictions: substance addictions, behavioral
addictions like gambling, so we can say that one of every ten people has a
problem with substances. And the big problem we are struggling with is
efficiency of addiction treatments right now. Because with the current methods of
treatments, like psychotherapy, only about 50% of people are able to finish the
treatment and among those who complete the treatment majority relapse. So in
case of heroin or other opioids for example the relapse rate within the next
two years is about 80%, so if there is 10 people who completed the addiction
treatment eight of them will relapse (come back to addictions) and 20 percent
of them will die during the next year after completing the treatment. So this
is very serious issue. In case of alcohol it is about 65 to 70 percent. Why is
it like that we can say okay it's like that because addiction is so persistent
and so severe and we just can not do anything else or maybe we just don't
understand what addiction is. And if we would understand it better then maybe we
would be able to provide a better treatment, more effective, so what we are
trying to do is to look into the brain using all the new technologies and
figure out how the addiction works. We already know that addiction is not a
one problem. There may be a few different brain circuits involved in addiction
development and we need to be able to recognize which circuits are problematic
are causing those problematic behaviors in the particular cases and then if we
are able to identify that we can provide a very personalized targeted treatment.
Right now we are about launching a new studies where we would like to test
new treatment methods like transcranial magnetic stimulation, so with a magnetic
field we can try to alter the brain functions in some brain areas and for
example help to quit the substance of abuse, but also we are using new
technologies like smartwatches to support the maintenance of abstinence.
If someone already completed the treatment it's important to be able to
maintain sober and one of the way to do that is to recognize the everyday
patterns of behavior and for example if those patters are changing in some
alerting way then we can warn the person that something wrong is going on and
help to for example change the behavior before the relapse happens. So
those are the common, the most modern ways to to study addictions right
now.
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