Like the strip to the mountain goat, some people have a small mutation in their DNA that predisposes them to cocaine addiction once they try it. Although this is a very preliminary finding, a team of researchers has found a gene that could explain why one in 10 people taking cocaine become dependent on this drug.

“The important thing is that we have found a first gene linked to vulnerability to cocaine addiction,” he explained IMABIS Foundation in Malaga, one of the Spanish scientists who collaborated in this study.

Although the brain is still today a great mystery, the continuing investigation of the body sheds little flashes of light on its operation. One thing we know is that drugs can give pleasure and addiction to act on the reward circuits. Cocaine, in particular, work by increasing the concentration of dopamine (the pleasure neurotransmitter) in the neurons of this system, thereby strengthening its consumption.

Based on this knowledge, researchers posed CaMKIV your attention. This enzyme is a major modulator of a protein called CREB, historically related to addiction, “says Ainhoa Bilbao, another of the researchers, from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany. “What we wanted was to find out if he adds the actors involved in the activation of CREB have something to do with addiction, and it turned to CaMKIV.

The most complex, yet more revolutionary, their studies was to create some mice that were used to study the precise function of this enzyme in addiction. They could do it the classic form, eliminating the CaMKIV gene throughout the body, or a “mutation restrictive, inhibiting gene expression only in cells of the dopamine reward system, which are what ultimately addictions behind.

Thanks to this work animal model “we are confident that the finding is very precise,” continues this Spanish researcher. And what they found was doubly surprising. First, the finding that CaMKIV protects against addiction, as the mice that lacked this gene had an answer psychomotor and reward much more marked in the administration of cocaine. That is, they became addicted more easily.