Just a couple of doses of cocaine can change the composition of the part of the brain associated with memory-based decision making, according to a team of researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco.
Almost immediately, mice that were administered cocaine grew far more new dendritic spines, which can form synapses and create new connections, than did mice that just got saline, according to a study published online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience.
“The fact that cocaine appears to rewire executive centers with one dose is pretty shocking,” said Linda Wilbrecht, a UC Berkeley neurology researcher affiliated with the center. “It isn’t that they came up over night, while the mouse was sleeping. They actually came up within two hours of the cocaine experience.”
Subsequent experiments suggested that those new spines correlated with what appeared to be addict behavior: Given a choice, mice with those new neuron spines headed back to the cocaine lounge. In scientific terms, they exhibited a “conditioned place preference” for the chamber where they got the cocaine, over the one where they got saline.
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