Methamphetamine doesn't just spike levels of the pleasure-inducing hormone dopamine in the reward pathways of the brain—it ...

Addiction doesn’t arise in isolation. For many individuals, it follows years of emotional adversity, trauma, nutrient depletion, and gut dysfunction. People experiencing addiction often eat poorly or ...

The nicotine found in tobacco stimulates the reward circuit, encouraging consumption and potentially leading to addiction. In a paper published in Neuron, scientists reveal how, in mice, a small ...

Remarkable scientific progress over the past five decades has helped us develop knowledge of how drugs of abuse induce pleasure, reinforce use, and lead to the compulsive self-administration we call ...

Research in mice has shown that fentanyl addiction is the result of two brain circuits working in tandem, rather than a single neural pathway as had been previously thought. One circuit underlies the ...

The new method is designed to focus specifically on pain-related signals, without interfering with normal activity in other parts of the brain. A new preclinical study has identified a gene therapy ap ...

Sign up for CNN’s Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part mindfulness guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it. Teens ...

One way to get that pleasure is to seek retaliation. Additional brain scan studies have shown that when people imagine ...

This is part of Revenge Week, a series about how vengeance runs America, from the White House to cheating spouses to that bad boss who totally deserved it. Imagine that you have two adorable pets: a ...

New research has found a drug that treats insomnia works to prevent the addictive effects of the morphine opioids in mice while still providing effective pain relief. New research led by UCLA Health ...

That innocent-looking donut might be triggering more powerful brain responses than the vodka it’s sometimes paired with. While society readily acknowledges alcohol’s addictive potential, we still ...