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

Why do some people become addicted to cocaine more quickly than others? For decades, scientists have debated whether addiction is driven by sensitization of the psychomotor effect of the drug (getting a bigger effect of the drug over time), sensitization of the motivational effects of the cues (incentive salience) or tolerance to the psychomotor effect of the drug (needing more of the drug to get the same effect). Our latest study using advanced machine vision and genetica

Sleep and circadian rhythm disruptions are some of the most common and frustrating symptoms of opioid use disorder. Many people in recovery struggle with insomnia or find that their internal biological clock is completely out of sync. In our latest study in collaboration tithe the Logan lab, we looked at a tiny but powerful region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) , which acts as the body's master clock, to see exactly how oxycodone rewires it. The Big Que