Cocaine use disorder is one of the most stubborn problems in addiction medicine. Roughly 1.4 million Americans meet the criteria for it, and after decades of research there is still not a single FDA-approved medication to treat it. We have known for a long time that genetics plays a role. Twin studies put the heritability of cocaine dependence as high as 70%, among the highest of any psychiatric condition. And yet, if you ask which genes are actually involved, the honest answ

For decades, a frustrating pattern has played out in addiction neuroscience: females were basically ignored, not even included in the studies. Then, thanks to the NIH SABV mandates almost exactly 10 years ago, researchers all over the country started including females. This shift has led to intriguing findings, including evidence suggesting that the estrous cycle may influence the motivation to take cocaine. Our lab recently published a paper in Psychopharmacology, led by Dr.

We’ve all heard stories about the opioid crisis, but one of the biggest mysteries remains: why can two people take the same dose of a painkiller, yet only one of them ends up struggling with addiction? While we know that individual risk varies wildly, identifying why one person transitions to dependency while another remains resilient is incredibly difficult because human lives are full of outside influences. In our latest study published in Neuropsychopharmacology , we condu