Naltrexone Molecule
20 years ago, scientists got hooked on a single transcription factor that responds to a number of drugs of abuse. Will their work lead to treatments?
By Kerry Grens
ARTICLE EXTRAS
O'Brien would like to include genetic data in addiction trials. "I think we ought to be genotyping patients?in all our clinical trials," he says. There are numerous genes whose polymorphisms might predict a person's risk for addiction and response to therapies, O'Brien adds. David Goldman at NIAAA says that understanding them might also reveal the subtype of addiction a person has. For example, SNPs in the gene coding for the GABA-a receptor have been linked with addiction, and Goldman has shown that one haplotype of the GABA-a receptor was most frequent among alcoholics with high anxiety.3 "We showed that although [this haplotype] is linked to alcoholism, it's through the anxiety dimension of behavior," he says. Goldman contends ...
