A team of scientists took a bunch of macaque monkeys, made them into alcoholics, and then successfully weaned them off the sauce after injecting their brains with a special gene — an experiment, detailed in a new paper published in Nature Medicine, that could potentially provide a compelling new treatment for addiction.
“Drinking went down to almost zero,” Oregon Health and Science University professor and co-author Kathleen Grant told The Guardian. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether.”
The researchers set out with the premise that continued alcohol use causes changes to neurons and hampers the dopamine “reward circuitry” in the brain.
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