addictions

A study of almost 6,000 people trying to quit smoking cigarettes finds that those who receive regular motivational text messages are twice as likely to quit than those who receive neutral text messages thanking them for participating in the study.

The txt2stop trial, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, measured cotinine (a chemical in tobacco) levels in the participants six months after participants reported to try quitting.

The randomly selected txt2stop group received five text messages a day for five weeks and then three a week for the following 26 weeks, with encouragements such as: "Cravings last less than 5 minutes on average. To help distract yourself, try sipping a drink slowly until the craving is over."

The txt2stop group was also able to text words such as "crave" and "lapse" to receive a motivating message during episodes of weakness and craving.

The control group, meanwhile, received only one message every two weeks thanking participants for being part of the trial.

Only 4.9 percent of the control group abstained from smoking throughout the six months, as determined through cotinine testing, while more than twice as many members (10.7 percent) of the txt2stop group succeeded.

"We are delighted with the results and hope that text motivation will now become a standard part of the quitting process," says Glyn Mcintosh of QUIT, which helped develop the text messages and find volunteers for the study.

The researchers, whose findings appear in The Lancet this week, say that txt2stop worked well across all age and social groups in the study.… Read more

Two recently published studies out of Seattle Children's Research Institute indicate that certain levels of media usage can lead to depression in college students as well as disrupt sleep patterns in preschool children.

Not exactly earth-shattering.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the researchers found in the first study that out of the 224 college students who took the Internet Addiction Test, only 9 of them (4 percent) scored in the "occasional problem" or "addicted" range.

To put what sounds like a small number in perspective, the researchers say that Internet over-usage is now more prevalent than asthma.… Read more

The notion of erasing memories associated with painful or harmful pasts is not a new one. But it has remained just that: a notion.

Now scientists in Israel say they have devised a method to erase memories that trigger cravings in rats addicted to cocaine--a method that works so well it actually results in rats ignoring the place where they had been scoring the drug.

"Memories can trigger a desire for the drug, including memories of the drug itself, the needle, or the environment in which the drug was consumed," says Hebrew University researcher Rami Yaka. "This research indicates the possibility of erasing these memories in a way that will allow addicts to cancel the associations they have in their minds regarding the drug."

The team worked with a small protein called ZIP, which has been found in other studies in recent years to erase memories and even, as a result, inhibit learning processes.

After giving the rats cocaine in a designated spot in their pens for a few weeks, the team injected ZIP into the nucleus accumbens, a brain region known to control pleasure, reward, fear, and more, and then returned the rats to their pens. The rats proceeded to ignore the location they had only recently sought out, suggesting they no longer remembered either the place, the effect of the drug, or perhaps both.

Yaka, who will present his team's findings at the Facing Tomorrow 2011 conference in Jerusalem next week, sees possibilities not just for drug addicts but also those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychological conditions.

Of course, it remains unclear whether the protein erases selective memories associated with drugs, or if other pleasure-and-reward memories are also affected. Will one also forget the sweetness of chocolate? The ecstasies of copulation? The kiss of a gentle summer's breeze?

If so, will it be worth it?… Read more

We should all be panicking, obviously: the omnipresence of glowing, wireless gadgets giving us constant access to an unlimited amount of news and social-media toys is bad for our brains.

To be more specific, earlier this month a team from the University of California at San Francisco published research that claimed digital information overload, from the onslaught of Twitter updates from the site of the latest natural disaster to your mom's FarmVille updates to that YouTube video of the baby raccoon freaking out in a bathtub, can impair mental performance. Appropriately, the results come right around a week designated … Read more

We all have habits to overcome, and we all know that Wilson's weakness is text messaging and abusing social networks, but what about me and Jeff? On today's show, you'll learn how Jeff overcame his filthy nail-biting and why I almost went bald at age 8.

It's challenging to differentiate between a habit and an addiction, but it's safe to say that an addiction is a behavioral pattern that escalates in frequency and advertises a lack of control. Smoking is one of the most pervasive examples of addiction in our society, but according to our first story of the day, text messaging may be the key to cessation!

According to new research at the University of Oregon, it may be possible to inhibit an individual's response to cravings brought on by addiction through reminders delivered via media like text messages.

"Research participants were prompted by eight text messages per day for three weeks to document their ongoing cravings, mood, and cigarette use" during the quitting process, the university said, and these messages may have helped some people curb their desire to smoke. Now if we can only find a way to help Wilson with his Facebooking...

A new book called "Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff" by Chris Fehily serves as an instruction manual… Read more

Imagine, if you will, that Tetris had a younger brother who was always getting into trouble. On this particular day, he managed to inject himself full of adrenaline, high-five Bejeweled, and ran off to start his own thing. This is Ponk.

The gameplay seems overwhelming at first: glowing orbs dropping with asteroid tails at a fairly steady rate. But once you get the hang of it, Ponk becomes a fascinatingly addictive challenge.

Unlike a lot of touch-screen games, Ponk requires a lot of touch. Players can move those little orbs all over the screen in order to create sets of … Read more

Just as catching a whiff of fresh coffee beans can trigger cravings for my own addictive habit of choice, many environmental cues can create a very real physical response in drug addicts.

Studying cravings is an important part of designing treatments for addictions, and scientists have long studied the way in which cues like videos and drug paraphernalia trigger those cravings. Now, one group of researchers are trying to find out if cues in virtual environments like Second Life can produce real drug cravings in addicts as well. And if so, are those cravings neurologically similar to ones resulting from … Read more

Once there are clinics for an addiction, it must be real.

And so it seems to be with video games. Once doctors declared that "World of Warcraft" was "the crack cocaine of gaming," everyone seemed to accept that gaming addiction was yet another human frailty.

Yet gaming companies chose to protect themselves with an end-user agreement that limited their own liability in creating something that might get others hooked.

However, Craig Smallwood, a Hawaii man who claims to be hooked on "Lineage II," has succeeded in the first round of what might be a … Read more

Let's face it: maps make scientists drool. And increasingly easy-to-use yet complex maps of anything from the spread of diseases to cloud formations kept all the geo geeks giddy at the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting in D.C. last week. One of those maps could reveal new clues about when and where drug addicts are at their most (and least) vulnerable.

When it comes to drug addiction, the tendency is to think in terms of a disease of the brain, says National Institute on Drug Abuse researcher David Epstein, whose presentation at the annual meeting included a … Read more