Human Services News

From Temple University:

The interaction between nicotine and alcohol, two of the most abused and co-abused drugs, can impact a person's ability to learn and could have implications for treating addiction, according to researchers at Temple University.

The study has also been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, Psychopharmacology.

"Whenever someone uses these two drugs together, there must be a reason why," says Gould, an associate professor of psychology at Temple.

In examining the drugs' interactive effects on learning, the researchers looked at the ability to learn and process contextual information, which is important for multiple reasons.

According to Gould, contextual learning taps into the part of the brain that is involved in declarative memory processes that define who we are, such as memories of our family, our wedding day, or graduating from school.

"Smoking may take the edge off of it at first, so they begin smoking and they smoke more and more until tolerance develops and they lose that edge.

"Now they are drinking and smoking and they are addicted to both," he adds.

"But if they try to quit smoking, they go into nicotine withdrawal, which results in a learning deficit.

According to Gould, this could feed into a spiral in which initially nicotine and alcohol each block the adverse effects of the other.

But as that happens, he says, smokers and drinkers develop tolerance and consume greater amounts of each drug, and then when they try quitting one or the other, they then have this cognitive deficit and may reach for either alcohol or nicotine or both to try and reverse it, but they just spiral into the addiction again.

Read more from this post.