Word: modafinil
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...That was the thinking, at least - but the thinking now turns out to be wrong, according to a new study published on March 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors say modafinil is not only the latest in a long line of chemical stimulants designed to keep users awake, alert and happy; it's also the latest to go straight to the brain's addiction centers in the process...
...modafinil, in many ways, is a very good thing. It was first marketed for treating narcoleptic sleep disorders in 1998, but doctors soon began prescribing it off-label to control attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and even the symptoms of schizophrenia. What starts off medicinal, however, often goes recreational, and modafinil soon developed a following among people (students, writers and others) who wanted alertness in a pill, either to become more productive or simply to have more...
...problem was, no one was entirely sure how modafinil worked. And that, coupled with the fact that it had not yet shown the powerful addictive potential of, say, crystal meth or cocaine, led to the assumption that it was the rare stimulant that left dopamine alone. That idea didn't sound believable to Volkow and her collaborator, chemist Johanna Fowler. (Read "How Much Sleep Do You Really Need...
...researchers thus recruited a small sample group of 10 men, ages 23 to 46; some of them got a placebo, while others took either 200 mg or 400 mg (typical therapeutic doses) of modafinil. All of the men's brains were then scanned using positron-emission tomography (PET scans). Volkow and Fowler were looking for dopamine activity - not just for overall dopamine levels, but also for the behavior of dopamine transporters...
...released and recycle it." The more dopamine that gets left in the spaces between cells, the longer its rewarding effect on the brain - and the likelier it is to lay down the roots of addiction. As Volkow and Fowler suspected, the PET scans of the men who had taken modafinil showed that dopamine transporters were indeed being blocked by the drug and overall levels were rising...