Are you a smoker? What if you woke up one day and forgot to smoke?
The dream of every smoker who is trying to quit is to have the desire to smoke suddenly vanish.
Quitting smoking is a common New Year's resolution. We all know it is bad for us, it is getting harder to be a smoker in a non-smoking world and they are expensive too.
But it is so darned hard to quit. Smokers get no sympathy, even from ex-smokers it sometimes seems, who should know exactly how hard it is. Numerous quitting-smoking programs and drugs exist, yet people who know better and want to quit still smoke.
So the recent study in the journal Science came as a lightning bolt. A patient who suffered a stroke that injured a particular area of his brain, quit smoking with apparent ease, even without a conscious effort to quit. He just forgot to smoke, as he put it to researcher Antoine Bechara.
The study came from the University of Southern California's year-old Brain and Creativity Institute, published in the Jan. 26 issue of Science. Authors on the paper were faculty members Antoine Bechara and Hanna Damasio, and graduate students Nasir Naqvi and David Rudrauf. They used information from the University of Iowa brain-damage registry database.No one was even looking at this area of the brain for smoking or other addictions.
The patient had suffered damage to a small area deep in the cerebral cortex called the insula, which is linked to the development of emotional feeling, positive or negative, about physical sensations.
After Bechara spoke to the patient, whose brain information had been submitted to the University of Iowa database, he looked at brain data from other stroke survivors with damage to the same area of the brain. They looked at data from 69 patients who smoked before suffering their brain injury and found 19 patients who had damage to the insula.
Of these, 13 had quit smoking, 12 of them with little or no effort within a day of their injury. What was most striking was that the patients did not cut down on smoking, they simply stopped. Nineteen of the remaining fifty patients, those with other brain injuries, also quit smoking but only four of them met the same "broken addiction" criteria.
The researchers think the finding might have implications for understanding and treating other addictive behaviors, such as alcoholism and overeating. It also points to the potential for treatment of these addictive behaviors with drugs that target the area of the brain.
In a press release from the Institute, researcher Bechara noted that while there is a need to protect functions of the insula associated with behaviors needed for survival, this area of the insula is specifically involved with learned behaviors, meaning that targeted drug treatment might be possible.
There are plans to look at data from other brain injury registries to see if the results can be confirmed but the study has won praise from other scientists for the fresh direction for research.
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