Friday 24 June 2022 10:45 PM DR MICHAEL MOSLEY: I'd have my brain zapped if it helped me quit my chocolate ... trends now
Are you addicted to cigarettes, gambling, alcohol, or painkillers? Or perhaps, like me, you are a chocaholic, who sometimes roams the house looking for a secret chocolate stash or goes out late at night in search of the next fix, despite knowing the damage that fat and sugar is going to inflict on body and brain.
The NHS defines addiction as ‘not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you’.
Based on this, I’d definitely describe myself as a chocolate addict.
So I was fascinated by a new study by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the U.S., who have managed to identify a specific circuit in the brain that seems to drive addictions — and which can be switched off (or at least turned down) using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
TMS involves applying a device, which looks a bit like a table tennis bat, to different parts of your head. It creates highly focused magnetic pulses, which generate an electric current that alters the activity of the parts of your brain that are closest to the device.
Are you addicted to cigarettes, gambling, alcohol, or painkillers? Or perhaps, like me, you are a chocaholic, who sometimes roams the house looking for a secret chocolate stash? (File photo)
That may sound rather scary, but a few years ago I had it done, while making a documentary about the brain. When they turned it on it felt a bit like someone hitting my head with a soft toy.
Using the TMS device, they blocked my ability to move my fingers (which was weird), then my ability to count to ten, and finally they used TMS to make it almost impossible for me to speak or sing.
F ortunately, it was temporary and I was assured by the researchers that it was safe and they had used it dozens of times on themselves, to switch off a range of things, from being able to see to being able to recognise faces.
TMS has been used in the U.S. for some time to treat cigarette cravings, with good results, and a recent study suggests it also helps wean people off cannabis.
Although they have a fairly good idea which bits of the brain are involved in addiction, it would be much more effective if doctors knew exactly which bits of the brain to target. And that is where this new study comes in.
The researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital started by looking at brain scans from dozens of people who had suddenly lost their cigarette cravings after a stroke or some other brain injury.
They then compared the damaged areas in these people’s brains with a group who’d had strokes but not lost their desire to smoke. They were able to identify three areas in the brain — the dorsal cingulate, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the insula, which are connected to form what they call an ‘addiction circuit’ —were only damaged in those who had lost their cigarette cravings.
And it seems this addiction circuit is not just related to cigarette cravings, because when they looked at the brain scans of alcoholics who had lost their desire to drink, they found damage to the same areas of the brain.
This is potentially very exciting, because there are millions of people in the UK who are addicted to drugs, alcohol or cigarettes, and existing treatments are both expensive and limited in their effectiveness.
There is a long way to go before TMS devices are likely to be in more widespread use, but if anyone is looking for a volunteer to see if it can curb chocolate addiction, they know where to find me.
If you have a serious problem you will need to see a professional. But whether it is alcohol, cigarettes or chocolate, these five steps should help if you want to give up or reduce
