Want to quit drinking? Then Stop smoking!

What would happen if someone went through alcohol withdrawal while either continuing or quitting smoking?

That’s exactly what the researcher Kelly Cosgrove and her team from Yale University asked themselves. They studied 22 alcohol-dependent men and five alcohol-dependent women along with 20 men and five women who weren't addicted to alcohol. About three-fifths of both groups were smokers.

The alcoholic group were admitted into the Department of Veterans Affairs' Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit for a treatment program, during which doctors underwent PET scans to measure the availability of GABA-A receptors—basically, the number of spots where a GABA-A molecule could attach and do its work—in different parts of the brain.

Alcohol and nicotine dependence result from complex processes in the brain, involving a number of different chemicals, known as neurotransmitters, that help regulate signals sent from neuron to neuron and across regions of the brain. One known point of overlap between alcohol and nicotine addiction, is a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid A. GABA-A actually slows down signals as they spread through the brain, but it's thought that it underlies the particular kind of high one gets when drinking and that nicotine similarly stimulates production of the chemical.

Over a four-week period, alcohol withdrawal led to higher levels of GABA-A receptor availability in both smokers and non-smokers, and at the same time, cravings for alcohol declined in both groups. However, alcohol-dependent non-smokers' levels returned to that of the non-smoking controls by the end of four weeks, while alcoholic smokers' levels remained throughout the treatment period.

An additional analysis suggested that there was a connection between GABA-A receptor availability and cravings for alcohol, but only among smokers. Continued smoking during withdrawal interfered with the subsequent normalization of the GABA-A receptors and was associated with higher levels of craving, which may increase relapse risk

A study using rhesus monkeys found that nicotine didn't play a role in GABA-A receptor availability, so it seems it's not nicotine but rather an unknown component of tobacco smoke that's to blame

The article was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1rfeyfL

References 

Nathan Collins: Smoking Might Make It Harder to Quit Drinking | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. | December 01, 2014

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