Addictions to substances cause brain damage.

Barcelona, October 2011.- The masterful Conference about the brain that has taught Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIDA (National Institute Drug Abuse) last Friday at the II International Congress of Dual pathology which was held in Barcelona, has been justified with scientific studies the damage suffered by the brain as a result of the intake of drugs and therefore, addiction. The plasticity of the brain of young adolescents is that they will seek a mental illness throughout his life and brain damage from the time at which to begin to try drugs, damage that can be traced through neuroimaging techniques. There are environmental factors that act as protective as well as vulnerability factors that lead to some subjects exposed to drugs become addicts.

Also, Volkow pointed out that certain social stressors and inherited biological vulnerability factors that determine the possibility of taking drugs. They also accused an early initiation in drug works to a subsequent addiction. On the other hand, certain mental disorders are also risk factors that they cooperate in the incidence of drug addiction such as abandonment during childhood that decreases brain connectivity and self-control in children, it predicts somehow, his mental health. People with mental disorders, there is less ability to self-control which contributes to install or maintain addiction.

el Dr. Szerman, President of the Spanish society of pathology Dual, organizing body of the Congress, has pointed out that mental disorders are disorders neurobiological development rather than the degeneration. Likewise, the assertion that all substances of abuse are matched with an endogenous system and therefore it has been argueda deficit in one of these systems could affect addictions.