All people from all social classes and ethnicities are vulnerable to the ubiquitous presence of drug addiction. Yet research into a cure gets less than 2 percent of the funding of other, more mainstream diseases like cancer.

To make up for this discrepancy, Karen Szumlinski, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, has paired her research with that of more designer diseases in order to gain the necessary funding she and her team would otherwise have been denied.

Fortunately, her method worked, and in an article recently published in The Journal for Neuroscience, Szumlinski and her team have found a potential site for attempting a cure for cocaine addiction: the prefrontal cortex.

“The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is primarily implicated in making decisions and thus plays an important role in impulse control,” said Griffin Downing, a research assistant at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience.

Through her research, Szumlinski has definitively shown diminished activity in this part of the brain, implying an inability to control the urge to take more of the drug. This finding fights the notion that addicts are just weak-minded people. Rather, they are physiologically unable to stop themselves from doing the drug. The circuit in their brain that would tell them not to just isn’t firing.

Though she focused primarily on cocaine in her study, Szumlinski points to similar findings from a plethora of other research showing that the diminished function exists in addicts of many different abused substances.

“For me, it’s not even about having a good time anymore. I’ll drink even when I don’t want to. I just see the bottle and the next thing I know it’s in my hand,” said an anonymous student with a self-described alcohol addiction.

These feelings of helplessness may be alien to some, but for people with a real addiction, it can control their lives.

Furthermore, such research begs the age-old question: which came first? Are people with less activity in the prefrontal cortex more likely to become addicted, or is the drug really damaging the prefrontal cortex?

To answer this question, Szumlinski and her team are focusing on cocaine and turning to animal studies using rats as the model organism. By doing so, she hopes to be able to prove the drug’s role in shutting down the prefrontal cortex.

Despite whether the diminished functioning is a cause or a result of the addiction, as far as Szumlinski is concerned, the effects are not necessarily permanent. Though certain brain circuits may be damaged, she does not believe they are too far gone to potentially be rebooted.

“We rationalized that if we could identify behaviorally relevant changes in protein function within the prefrontal cortex, and [if] the protein was ‘druggable,’ then we might be able to reverse protein dysfunction and return behavior closer to that of a non-addicted brain,” Szumlinski said.

So the goal was clear: find something to reboot the damaged brain. And find something they did. Using medications already approved by the FDA, they were able to reactivate the prefrontal cortices of cocaine-addicted mice.

Unfortunately, the news is not all good. Because our society does not fully recognize addiction as a disease, health insurance companies have very limited coverage for such medications.

According to Szumlinski, a person can only obtain coverage for drugs related to ameliorating addiction for a maximum of three months, but addiction is a chronic, relapsing disorder. Thus, such policies are ineffective for truly treating the disease and essentially only prolong the time until the next relapse.

In order for drug addiction to be truly treatable, at least through medication, substantial policy changes will need to be made to incorporate these new findings.

KYLE SCROGGINS can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

Researchers from UC Davis and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have revealed the various parts of the brain that work together to recollect memories.

According to Andrew Watrous, the lead author of the study and a UC Davis graduate student, other researchers and doctors have looked at the brain through fMRI scans, but with less direct methods.

“The problems [with past methods] are first, indirect measurements and second, slow resolution or time to develop,” Watrous said.

In contrast, the new method provides new insights by taking far more detailed brain scans and taking scans of a larger area.

“[We] recorded different areas of the brain simultaneously such as the frontal and parietal lobe and areas that were thought to be key in memory retrieval. [The] advantage is that we’re recording brain activity in various areas while we are spatially aware of them,” Watrous said.

Using these recordings, the researchers could record not only which parts of the brain were activated, but when they were activated as well.

“We were the first group to combine these recordings and graph theory,” said Arne Ekstrom, senior investigator and an assistant professor at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience.

The approach of graphing the recordings of areas of the brain provided a fresh perspective for the study of memory recollection.

In order to record the activity, electrodes were placed inside the skull.

“We work with a neurosurgeon, such as Nitin Tandon. He dissects part of the skull and places the electrodes on the brain in multiple locations, puts the skull back on and the patients recover,” Ekstrom said.

The patients were individuals suffering from epilepsy. Due to their history, the researchers understood what parts of their brain were affected by epilepsy and how they might have been involved in recollecting memories.

In addition, according to Watrous, the neurosurgeon placed the electrodes on both the healthy and the epilepsy-affected parts of the brain to fully comprehend the process of memory recollection.

“You can place the electrodes on top of the brain and they can be read through the scalp. So what is unusual [about this method] is the number of electrodes placed, [providing] unprecedented access to the different signals into the brain,” Ekstrom said.

The more electrodes are used, the more accurate the readings will be, since each electrode is responsible for recording a smaller part.

Through the study, the researchers found that there were different frequencies regarding the type of memory, such as temporal versus spatial.

“The brain resonated at a lower frequency [when considering judgments about space in comparison to judgments about order or time],” Ekstrom said.

The researchers observed these frequencies by considering their oscillation as recorded by the machinery.

“Think of a wave on the ocean. A surfer at the top of the wave has a lot of potential energy that they use as they ride down. We can use these recordings to estimate the frequency components using a variety of methods, such as Fourier transform and wavelet transform,” said Christopher Conner, a researcher on the University of Texas team responsible for data collection.

“Low frequency waves have very high amplitude. These are the huge waves the surfer actually rides. They come once every 10 to 20 seconds. Very high frequency waves have small amplitude. These are the little ripples you see on the top of the wave — just a couple inches tall, hundreds of them per second,” Conner said. “If you look at the wave, there are more ripples at the top than the bottom. It’s the same way with our recordings. What we did was to see how the high amplitude, low frequency waves coordinated the smaller ripples between areas. To push the metaphor to the extreme: Tsunamis travel thousands of miles, ripples don’t. So if you want to send information a long way, use the low frequency range to do it.”

Those ripples or frequencies were recorded while patients learned about new environments or a specific order of activities in the day. When patients attempted to recollect those memories, the researchers would examine the frequencies and the areas involved in recalling the memory.

From this study, researchers glean another insight toward how the human brain works.

“In that sense, we must know how they communicate with one another. This work represents a crucial step in that direction — that areas can use different carrier frequencies to align information transfer,” Conner said.

For future expansion of the study, Ekstrom has considered studying two ideas: what happens if we disrupt the network, and the use of fMRI to map graphs of the human brain to facilitate understanding of the memory recollection process.

According to Conner, brain function can only be truly understood in the context of how the whole brain network operates.

VICTORIA TRANG can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

As natural disasters go, earthquakes are among the most destructive, as well as the most mysterious. Originating beyond the range of direct observation, miles below the surface, they usually strike with little or no warning.

The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11, 2011 was a humbling reminder that even the world’s most earthquake-prepared nation could be overwhelmed by sudden catastrophe.

But such megaquakes are rare, once-in-a-1000 year events in a given region. The majority of earthquake damage, according to UC Davis geophysicist John Rundle, is caused by earthquakes in the range of magnitude 6 to 7. Because the magnitude scale is logarithmic, every whole number represents 10 times the power of the preceding whole number, meaning that a 9.0 earthquake releases 100 times the energy of a 7.0.

These relatively smaller, but still powerful, quakes might occur in seismically active regions every decade and can wreck a city, as in the case of the 7.0 Haiti quake of 2010 or the 6.3 Christchurch quake of 2011.

“These earthquakes are much more significant, they occur much more frequently and there’s a reasonable chance of forecasting them,” Rundle said, speaking from Japan. He traveled there last week to help establish an institute for multi-hazard studies as a collaborative venture of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, which includes UC Davis.

Rundle is part of a team of physicists, geologists and computer scientists at UC Davis working to improve statistical models that forecast the likelihood of medium-to-large earthquakes in specific areas within intervals of months or years. The basic principle is to use sequences of smaller earthquakes to find patterns that can be used to predict larger ones. One of the key foundations of such work is the well-established relationship between the number of small earthquakes and the number of larger earthquakes on a given fault system, known as the Gutenberg-Richter law.

A major challenge facing earthquake researchers is the lack of direct measurements of the stresses along a fault system that lead to the rupture we feel as an earthquake. Instruments placed in boreholes can sample only isolated points along the system, and even then, only measure changes, rather than absolute values, of the mechanical stress of the constantly shifting crust.

By sticking to observables — the sequences of earthquakes recorded by seismometers around the world as well as sedimentary records of past events — some regularity in earthquake behavior can be detected over long periods of time. The challenge of forecasting has been working these statistical generalizations down to reliable forecasts on timescales relevant to disaster planning and risk management.

One outcome of this effort is Open Hazards, a company Rundle and his colleagues founded to make the practical results of their work on earthquake forecasting available to the public. Among other things, its website allows users to produce personal earthquake forecasts based on location. (Davis locals can rest easy, with a 0.09% chance of an earthquake greater than magnitude 5 hitting within 50 miles in the next month.)

Another approach to forecasting attempts to model the physical interaction of earthquake faults with each other to reproduce what researchers hope are naturally occurring patterns of earthquakes. Virtual California is one such program that models the crust in 3 x 3 kilometer sections overlaid with known faults that trade off stress to one another over long stretches of simulated time.

“We don’t know what the state of the earth is now, but we let it run forward and hopefully there will be regular patterns,” said Eric Heien, lead developer for the UC Davis-based Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, a group which develops computer model simulations for deep-earth processes.

While forecasts speak in the language of probabilities, short-term prediction has held out the promise of certainty — the type that would be needed, for example, to evacuate an area prior to an earthquake. But such certainty has been elusive, in large part because definitive precursor signals have been notoriously inconsistent.

UC Davis geology professor Donald Turcotte said that while laboratory studies of fracturing rock and other simulated earthquake experiments suggest that seismic precursors should occur as stresses build toward an earthquake, foreshocks are by no means consistent precursors to major earthquakes. This seems to suggest that the geophysical mechanisms of earthquake formation are still far from understood.

Turcotte said he is also skeptical of efforts to detect non-seismic precursor signals, such as electromagnetic emissions that some researchers have sought to connect to earthquake formation. The basic problem is separating any perceived precursor from background seismicity.

“There are periods of time where people think they see glimmers of hope, and then they seem to recede,” Turcotte said. “The hope of doing accurate short-range prediction is not all that good.”

Despite the many uncertainties inherent in earthquake science, one certainty stands out: the growing danger of natural hazards to global populations.

“One of the reasons that disasters are so much larger these days is because global populations are moving into risky areas,” Rundle said. “It’s certainly not true that the earthquakes are on average bigger, but people’s exposure is growing exponentially and therefore so is the cost and the death toll.”

OYANG TENG can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

The dreaded hangover — the punishment of a night out for college students. With the headache, nausea and sensitivity to light, it will ruin your next day and make you regret everything when you have three midterms and a lab report due that week.

What causes a hangover in the first place?

“[It is a] combination of factors including too much alcohol, which is a toxin and is metabolized to even more toxic substances, like acetaldehyde, that must be further metabolized and excreted to prevent further toxicity,” said Thomas J. Ferguson, the Medical Director at the UC Davis Student Health and Wellness Center. “The most important factor is to avoid ingestion of too much alcohol.”

UC Davis brewing professor Charles Bamforth has a similar opinion.

“I preach moderation and responsibility — i.e., do not get the hangover in the first place,” Bamforth said.

Dedicated partiers should not fear, for doctors have been researching a real hangover cure. Researchers at UCLA have put together two enzymes in a pill that, when tested, significantly increased the rate of alcohol metabolism in the body.

“We used two enzymes, alcohol oxidase, capable of oxidizing alcohol into acetaldehyde and hydrogen peroxide, and catalase, capable of decomposing toxic hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen,” said Yunfeng Lu, professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA and the principal investigator for this project.

Paired together in a polymer casing, the two enzymes work as a team to help remove alcohol from your system. One enzyme will break down the alcohol while the other will complete the processes by then breaking down the hydrogen peroxide, which the first enzyme creates, to water and oxygen. These extra enzymes take the strain out of your liver and make your recovery much faster.

This product has been studied thoroughly and no side effects were reported in the researchers’ experiments. The lack of side effects is especially promising since the researchers hope to be able to use their product on humans.

“I am certain that as described, this medication would come under some pretty close scrutiny because the enzymes that metabolize alcohol may have other effects in humans. That is, they could interfere with other metabolizations and potentially place the individual at risk,” Ferguson said.

There are still some steps to go before the medication could be approved, but the researchers are already halfway there.

“The digestion of alcohol in the human body consists of two steps, from alcohol into acetaldehyde, and from acetaldehyde into acetic acid. We have developed the enzyme for the first step,” Lu said. “We are currently making the enzyme for the second step. Once this is done, we can pack the enzymes together and will have a complete solution, a product everyone can use within two years.”

Though this is a discovery on its own, Lu and his colleagues have done more than just fix your hangover. The creation of a nanocomplex of enzymes is the first step in creating solutions for a wide range of problems. The new doors being opened can potentially lead to a wide variety of “cures” for behavior-induced sickness.

KELLY MITCHELL can be reached at science@theaggie.org.