The study found a mechanism of the hypothalamus loop in opioid addiction memory.

On July 16, Zhu Yingjie's team from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and The Team of Chen Xiaoke of Stanford University jointly published a research paper online in the international journal Neuron, confirming that the ventricle side nuclear (PVT) is a key node of the opioid addiction-related memory network, and revealing that the PVT-NAc-LH neural loop is a potential target for the treatment of opioid addiction.
Zhu Yingjie and Chen Xiaoke are co-authors of this article.
opioids, including drugs such as opium and heroin, as well as clinically potent analgesics such as morphine and fentanyl, are common types of addictive substances.
different from other types of memory, such as learning and cognition, drug addiction can form persistent, stubborn, highly environmentally correlated memories in the brain and cause structural damage to the brain.
after the lifting of compulsory drug treatment, addicts return to the past environment, contact with drug friends can easily arouse the associated memory, thus triggering drug addiction, resulting in re-absorption.
therefore, drug use for a long time is "once infected with drugs, life-long difficult to quit", and ultimately led to "a loss of footfore for thousands of years of hatred."
since drug-related memories are distributed in the brain's neural networks, it is important for science and society to be able to eliminate drug memory by interfering with the relevant brain loops.
researchers used the most cutting-edge transparent brain technology, chemical genetics, optogenetics, diaphragm clamps, neural loop tracing, immuno-3D imaging and other research methods, found that the two hypothalamus downstream loop and addictive memory are closely related: PVT-CeA loop is the key neural pathway of drug addiction memory formation, responsible for The rewards generated by opioids are associated with the environment, and the PVT-NAc-LH loop is an important neural pathway for the maintenance of addictive memory, and the PVT-NAc or NAc-LH pathways can be manipulated in the memory extraction stage by means of light genetics, which can eliminate the associated memory of addiction and thus prevent the occurrence of resoruction behavior.
this work further illustrates how PVT regulates the formation and maintenance of addiction memory through two downstream pathways.
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