Research progress of deep brain stimulation for the treatment of drug addiction

Abstract

Drug addiction is a serious problem all over the world involving both medical and social issues. The treatment strategy lies in two aspects, promoting detoxification and preventing relapse. The latter is the key for successful treatment. Although surgical measures, like stereotactic ablation of nucleusaccumbens (NAc), had already been proven to be effective for relapse prevention clinically, the application was restricted because of the damage to brain tissues. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), which had been successfully applied in movement disorders, was recently performed in addiction studies on both animals and humankind. Among numbers of brain areas related to addiction, NAc is the hottest target studied and may bring better clinical effect. In addition, combining stimulation of multiple brain targets is currently performed for relapse prevention. The mechanism of DBS for treatment of addiction remains unclear right now, however, DBS may be an experimental method to treat refractory addictive patients. Certainly, lots of problems need to be solved in large sample study before the wide application of DBS for addiction treatment, such as the setting of stimulation parameters, recognition of objective treatment feedback and ethical issues.

DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1672-6731.2015.10.004