Exercise Could Help People Kick the Habit
More than 100 specialists in exercise and neurobiology came together last week for a two-day conference to discuss physical activity’s potential in fighting addiction to drugs and alcohol.
The question is just how regular physical activity of varying intensity might affect mood, academic performance, even the very reward systems in the brain that can get hijacked by substance abuse.
Exercise’s positive effects on overall health and weight loss are well known, but when National Institute on Drug Abuse chief Dr. Nora Volkow discovered a study that found tweens and teens who reported exercising daily to be half as likely to smoke as their sedentary counterparts, and 40 percent less likely to experiment with marijuana.
Exercise seems to invigorate neurochemicals that sense and reinforce pleasure.
"In children, it’s innate," she notes. "Children want to move."
However, the obesity epidemic indicates that children in the U.S. are becoming more sedentary. As time in front of the television increasingly replaces outdoor play, sedentary youngsters grow up to be sedentary adults.
"Why do we lose the ability to experience pleasure from physical activity?" asks Volkow.
At last week’s conference, Volkow announced $4 million in new research grants to help.
Drug treatment programs often include exercise, partly to keep people distracted from their cravings, but there’s been little formal research on the effects.
But researchers at Brown University found good evidence to prove that exercise may help people kick the habit. During their study, lead researcher Dr. Bess Marcus took smokers to the gym three times a week and found that the addition of regular physical exercise doubles women’s chances of successfully breaking the habit. What’s more ““ the women also gained half as much weight as those who managed to quit smoking without exercising.
Marcus cautions that people trying to kick an addiction have a powerful incentive to exercise. Could that possibly translate into prevention? Among the clues:
– Rats were less likely to ingest amphetamines if their cages had running wheels, suggesting exercise stimulated a reward pathway in the brain to leave them less vulnerable to the drug’s rush.
– In people, exercise acts as a mild antidepressant and relieves stress. Depression, anxiety and stress increase risk of alcoholism, smoking or drug abuse.
– Volkow is intrigued that attention deficit disorder and obesity both involve problems with the brain chemical dopamine, one system that drugs hijack to create addiction.
– Baby monkeys who don’t play enough in childhood have problems controlling aggression when they’re older. The most aggressive tend to have defects involving the feel-good brain chemical serotonin – and binge-drink when researchers offer them alcohol.
– Back to rats, physical activity increases production of growth factors and stem cells in key brain regions important for learning and mood; increases formation of blood vessels; and strengthens communication networks between brain cells.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health noted that there is still too little valuable research to indicate whether exercise really has an affect.
But, a few studies of school-age children suggest physical activity predicts better performance on math, verbal and other tests – and better school performance in turn is linked to lower risk for substance abuse.
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