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The Mount Sinai research team discovered that estrogen intensifies the brain's dopamine reward pathway and demonstrated that cocaine has its most potent effects during the estrous/menstrual cycle, when release of estrogen is at its highest. Their research suggests that a possible addiction intervention could be to adjust this hormonal cycle through use of birth control pills or a similar strategy. "Our study will change the way we think about addiction research to emphasize the need to further understand female subjects, as most research on addiction has been conducted in male subjects," says Erin Calipari, PhD, co-first author on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine. "Further study of the estrogen-reward pathway is important, as it is quite possible that estrogen may have similar effects on other forms of substance abuse." Dr. Calipari is a member of the Laboratory of Molecular Psychiatr y, led by the study's senior inve...

In the first national analysis of the impact of e-cigarettes on trends in youth smoking in the United States, UCSF researchers did not find evidence that e-cigarettes have caused youth smoking to decline. In fact, combined e-cigarette and cigarette use among adolescents in 2014 was higher than total cigarette use in 2009, according to the study. The authors concluded that the low-risk youth in the study, who went on to smoke regular cigarettes, may not have used nicotine at all if e-cigarettes did not exist. The study will be published online January 23, 2017 in  Pediatrics as well as the February print issue of the journal. "We didn't find any evidence that e-cigarettes are causing youth smoking to decline," said lead author Lauren Dutra, a former postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and current social scientist at RTI International, a not-for-profit research organization based in North Carolina. "While some o...