Gonna Have To Face It...

Time for a rant.

Now, I know addiction is a sad thing, I know that it's very tough to break any habit, especially when the means for your addiction is so readily available. Think smoking, drinking, gambling, even food (more on that later). The accessibility of these makes it so easy to feed a habit it's quite scary to think how difficult it might be to break the cycle.

Then there are the excuses: I'm fat because of my genes, I smoke because of my nerves, I need a drink to relax, etc, etc. I have heard these excuses recycled time and time again and when I see someone wheeled into my place of work with a whole bunch of tubes up the nose and so many cannulae they could be at an acupuncturists I can't help but think "if you'd laid off the fags / pies / special brew / crack and smack party bags then this would never have happened and you would not be in such pain from whatever it is you've got."

So when I saw this article from the BBC my heart sank. It actually popped up a couple of years ago when the same researchers found a so-called "smoking gene": a polymorphism that appears to correlate with increased tobacco consumption (and increased lung cancer risk - now how about that?). The polymorphism (well, three of them to be precise) encodes the nicotinic receptor that is usually activated by acetylcholine - part of the parasympathetic nervous system. But enough of that stuff.

The implication that arises from this is what really worries me: are smokers likely to use this as yet another excuse to not give up?

The mechanisms behind addiction are pretty well defined: you take a stimulus, the result of which is a good feeling: caused by dopamine and endorphin release via something called the CART peptide (Cocaine-amphetamine-related-transcript, which according to the paper I've linked to also may be related to schizophrenia). The more you take of the substance, the fewer dopamine receptors are available to be activated: they downregulate. Hence you need to take more and more, just to get the dopamine hit...

Where the food thing comes in, ah yes: basically eating produces the same dopamine release. Makes sense, the brain rewards you for eating, for surviving. Well done, you. This leads me to wonder: while this smoking gene apparently predisposes people specifically to smoke, when they give up are they more likely to become overweight / obese through the dopamine thing or is this a nicotinic receptor-specific thing? From past experience I can truthfully say I put on weight when I gave up smoking but then I also gave up playing rugby around the same sort of time: lack of exercise and overeating, d'oh! Who knows? Anyway, I honestly think one addiction leads to another, but anyone who specifically says "oh, I have an addictive personality" needs to be shot. EVERYONE has an addictive personality, it's just that some people are more in control of it than others. Stop making bloody excuses.

Anyway, as if the likes of ASH, the NHS and WHO didn't have enough on their hands already.