Alcohol Researchers Still Wary of Combined Addiction Institute

 
Why can’t we all just get along?

A long time ago, an intrepid institutional director named Francis Collins promised his minions (as former NIH director Harold Varmus had promised his) that he would unite the nation’s two mighty addiction research bodies, The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), for the greater good of the entire kingdom—researchers and taxpayers alike.

Hasn't happened yet. 

Existing within the large institutional framework of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the two agencies overlap sufficiently to make them prime candidates for a consolidation. Advocates of the merger, most of them advocates for NIDA, also suggest that the research itself will improve as a result of a decrease in “overlapping missions.”

However, as I wrote in 2010, the NIAAA has a long list of reasons why the merger—which looks, from the NIAAA point of view, more like an acquisition—is a bad idea. Alcohol use disorders are different than other drug addictions, researchers at NIAAA commonly propose. The genetics of alcoholism differs from the genetics of drug addiction, they say, and most people with “alcohol use disorders” don’t abuse other drugs. Furthermore, alcohol damages the brain and other organs in a consistent pattern “best suited to a single alcohol institute,” according to the NIAAA’s acting director.

At this stage, NIAAA’s heel dragging is patently obvious. The agency has always been the weaker sister in the addiction research family. With only half of NIDA’s billion-dollar budget, NIAAA deals strictly with alcohol research, even if the NIAAA has at times seemed unsure of what constitutes its main area of study—alcohol the addictive drug, or alcohol the healthy beverage. The merger would represent a recognition that alcohol is just another drug, albeit a legal one.

In a recent issue of Addiction Professional, Alison Knopf writes that “the alcoholism research field, which believes it would lose out under such a definition, is still fighting the reorganization. And some openly question whether the ‘merger’ ever will come to pass at all.”

Among the many unanswered questions are these, says Knopf: "The current portfolios for AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), liver disease and smoking—where the most money is at the two institutes—may or may not stay within the new institute. Also unknown to many is whether the new institute will cover all addictions (including those such as food and gambling) or will be devoted to the health effects of alcohol and drugs only."

The dark mutterings among alcohol researchers get even more specific in Knopf’s article. In one scenario, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) “would go to the National Institute of Child Health and Development, liver disease and the entire organ damage portfolio would go to the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases, and cancer-related research would go to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). What would happen to drunk driving research is still unknown.”

Furthermore, “NIDA is worried about losing its AIDS funding, because it represents one-third of the institute’s budget.”

The NIH Substance Use, Abuse, and Addiction (SUAA) task force continues to wrestle with the question, which was originally to be decided by the end of the year. In the end, Knopf writes, one persistent rumor has stayed alive: The notion that “the alcohol beverage industry is lobbying Kentucky politicians, including U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, to keep the institutes separate because it doesn’t want alcohol to be associated with cocaine.”

Graphics Credit: http://www.puzzlemachine.com

Drinking on Television

  

Does alcohol on TV make you bend the elbow?

I have a guest post at All About Addiction covering a journal article in Alcohol and Alcoholism with the unambiguous title: “Alcohol Portrayal on Television Affects Actual Drinking Behaviour.”

It is an easy and familiar accusation. Over time, it has been levied at violent video games, drug use in the movies and alcohol advertising of every stripe. But what is the actual evidence for it? Leave it to a group of Dutch scientists to design a practical experiment to test the proposition when it comes to drinking.... More.

Photo credit: http://josh-wyxl.itmblog.com/page/14/

The Alcoholic Rats of Dr. Li.

Excerpt from chapter 1 of The Chemical Carousel.

In the early 1990s, it was safe to say that Dr. Ting-Kai Li was in possession of the largest and most famous collection of alcoholic rats in the world.

Housed in a laboratory near Dr. Li’s office at Indiana University, the “P-line” of rodents were freely self-administering the body-weight equivalent of one bottle of whiskey a day for a 155-pound man; a blood alcohol concentration that would have gotten them arrested on any highway in America. The P-line rats were seriously addicted to ethanol, the purified form of booze known outside the laboratory as grain alcohol, or white lightning.

“It’s actually the only line that’s been well developed in the world,” Dr. Li told me at the time, with justifiable pride. “And it has been developed through genetic selection for alcohol preference.” In other words, Dr. Li did not teach these animals to drink. He didn’t have to.

Dr. Li, who was until recently the Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which is the alcoholism wing of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), made it sound easy: “You take a stock with some genetic heterogeneity in it, and then you test it for drinking behavior, and there will be, say, two or three out of a hundred that like to drink, so you take those, and you breed them. And the ones that don’t like to drink, you breed those, and within ten generations you start to have a very good separation between drinking scores.”

Why would a rat drink alcohol, and why would anybody care? When I first spoke with Ting-Kai Li, the lack of suitable animal models of alcoholism and addiction was all too apparent. Without suitable strains of test animals, most genetic and neurobiological research would take centuries, and would involve ethical questions about human testing far stickier than the questions raised by the animal rights movement. Animal models are one of the primary pathways of discovery available to neurobiologists and other researchers.

The precisely spoken, self-effacing Dr. Li, along with neurobiology professor Dr. William McBride and their co-workers at Indiana University, were never really in the business of teaching rats to drink. They were in the business of discovering ways to make them stop.

To be like human alcoholics, the rats must also demonstrate both an increased tolerance to the effects of the drug, and the onset of physical dependence as manifested by withdrawal symptoms. And they do. The P-line rats develop tolerance, and they show acute withdrawal symptoms when researchers cut off their supply. The rats suffer tremors, seizures, and a rodent version of delirium tremens. They fall down a lot. They are also quick to avail themselves of a little “hair of the dog.” After a period of abstinence, they take alcohol again to relieve the withdrawal symptoms.

The P-line rats met every definition of alcoholism anyone could imagine, and the cause of their alcohol addiction appears to be strictly genetic. What was happening with the P-line rats was not explainable by resorting to arguments about simple learned behavior.

“How do you explain this difference?” said Dr. Li, all those years ago. “My explanation is that there are genetic differences among different individuals. You’re making the assumption that you expose them to the same environment, the same environmental influences, and yet they behave differently in terms of addiction.”

Today, we can safely say that Dr. Li’s hypothesis has proven to be true.

© Copyright 2008

Photo Credit: smh.com.au

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