For anybody who’s in New Orleans for SFN this week, come by room 273 at 1pm today to learn about vulnerabilities for drug addiction. It’s an excellent nanosymposium set up by the fantastic Dr. Jenn Murray covering both human and preclincial studies into risk factors for addiction. The talks will include investigations into the classic predictive traits of impulsivity, anxiety and novelty-seeking, and they’ll also delve into environmental risk factors for addiction, such as maternal care and environmental stimulation.
I’ll be presenting first (so be there at 1pm sharp!) on my work on endophenotypes for addiction. This involves studying both dependent drug users and their non-dependent biological siblings, who share 50% of their genes and the same environment growing up, but who never developed any sort of drug or alcohol abuse. I’ll be looking specifically at cognitive control deficits and frontal cortex abnormalities in both of these groups compared to unrelated healthy control volunteers. There are some surprises in the results, so if you’re at SFN come by at 1pm to find out what they are!
Brain Study 