Psychology & Neuroscience
Nicotinamide: A New Form of Rehab? By Diana Chapman
Photo by Marco Verch [CC-BY 2.0]
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he number of drug disorders and deaths is continuing to skyrocket, with more than 70,000 Americans dying from drug overdose in 2019 alone, but unfortunately the majority of people who do seek help before it is too late often fall back into the cycle of relapse following treatment.1 Rehabilitation can help many patients maintain abstinence from substances, but not all people can afford or access treatment options; the lengthy, daunting, and emotional process of rehab can also frighten some people with addiction away altogether. Furthermore, many people who have been treated for drug addiction still have lingering effects that can lead to relapse later on in life. The effects include psychological and physiological cues that researchers have discovered can tap a part of a former or current patient’s brain and drive them to relapse.2 These cues may come from work stress or even something as simple as walking down a street where one bought or took drugs before. This part of recovery is extremely difficult for many people to get through, but Emily Witt, a neuroscience graduate researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill, is working to see how a form of Vitamin B3 may help prevent the notion of needing to respond to these pervasive cues using animal research. Nicotinamide, or NAM, a pharmaceutical used mostly for acne and dermatological treatments, has recently Figure 1. Chemical structure come into light as a possible of nicotinamide [PubChem] aid in the treatment of sev-
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eral animal forms of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases (Figure 2).3 One of the ways NAM is thought to improve the effects of these disorders is through inhibition of an enzyme called PARP, or poly(adp-ribose)polymerase.⁴ Interestingly, researchers have also seen the activation of this enzyme in those suffering from addiction, prompting some to anecdotally indicate NAM as a possible avenue of addiction treatment.⁵ These arguments pointed at the conclusion that NAM could possibly be used to prevent drug relapse, but Witt and Dr. Kathryn Reissner, a UNC psychology professor, wanted to give a firmer conclusion to the rumors floating around the scientific community. The pair set out to create an experiment to see if NAM specifically diminished the responses caused by a cue. To do so, they first induced an association between cocaine and an environmental stimulus in an animal model. 225 male and 175 female Sprague-Dawley rats were trained to press a lever for cocaine self-administration, causing a presentation of a tone and light illumination for five seconds.3 Over time, Pavlovian conditioning occurred, in which the light and tone presentation induced the behavioral response even in the absence of cocaine administration. Then, following the 12-day conditioning period and a 15-day abstinence period, the rats individually went through a process of receiving the light stimulus in order for researchers to see if the rats pressed the lever. Half of the rats were given NAM injections prior to this process; in the first two sessions of the process, the response of the lever press from the rats resulted in the concurrent light and tone presentation, and, in the last sessions, the lever press
