Researchers have identified a key brain protein involved in cocaine addiction.

A new study conducted by a team of Indiana University neuroscientists demonstrates that GLT1, a protein that clears glutamate from the brain, plays a critical role in the craving for cocaine that develops after only several days of cocaine use.

The study showed that when rats taking large doses of cocaine are withdrawn from the drug, the production of GLT1 in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain implicated in motivation, begins to decrease. But if the rats receive ceftriaxone, an antibiotic used to treat meningitis, GLT1 production increases during the withdrawal period and decreases cocaine craving.

Ceftriaxone appears to block craving by reversing the decrease in GLT1 caused by repeated exposure to cocaine. In fact, ceftriaxone increases GLT1, which allows glutamate to be cleared quickly from the brain. The Rebec research group localized this effect to the nucleus accumbens by showing that if GLT1 was blocked in this brain region even after ceftriaxone treatment, the rats would relapse.

While an earlier paper of George Rebec, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, showed the effects of ceftriaxone on cocaine craving, the new paper was the first to localize the effects of ceftriaxone to the nucleus accumbens and was the first to show that ceftriaxone works after long withdrawal periods.

"The idea is that increasing GLT1 will prevent relapse. If we block GLT1, the ceftriaxone should not work," Rebec said. "We now have good evidence that ceftriaxone is acting on GLT1 and that the nucleus accumbens is the critical site."
Ceftriaxone is now in clinical trials on people with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig`s disease, which has many mechanisms in common with other neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington`s disease and Alzheimer`s.

The study has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

A new study has shown that the pattern of brain responses to words in 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder predicted the youngsters` linguistic, cognitive and adaptive skills at ages 4 and 6.

The findings are among the first to demonstrate that a brain marker can predict future abilities in children with autism.

"We`ve shown that the brain`s indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds already diagnosed with autism predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviors," said lead author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington`s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

"This is true four years after the initial test, and regardless of the type of autism treatment the children received," she said.

In the study, 2-year-olds - 24 with autism and 20 without - listened to a mix of familiar and unfamiliar words while wearing an elastic cap that held sensors in place. The sensors measured brain responses to hearing words, known as event-related potentials.

The research team then divided the children with autism into two groups based on the severity of their social impairments and took a closer look at the brain responses. Youngsters with less severe symptoms had brain responses that were similar to the typically developing children, in that both groups exhibited a strong response to known words in a language area located in the temporal parietal region on the left side of the brain.

This suggests that the brains of children with less severe symptoms can process words in ways that are similar to children without the disorder. In contrast, children with more severe social impairments showed brain responses more broadly over the right hemisphere, which is not seen in typically developing children of any age.
"We think this measure signals that the 2-year-old`s brain has reorganized itself to process words. This reorganization depends on the child`s ability to learn from social experiences," Kuhl said.

She cautioned that identifying a neural marker that predicts future autism diagnoses with assurance is still a ways off.

The researchers also tested the children`s language skills, cognitive abilities, and social and emotional development, beginning at age 2, then again at ages 4 and 6.

The children with autism received intensive treatment and, as a group, they improved on the behavioral tests over time. But the outcome for individual children varied widely and the more their brain responses to words at age 2 were like those of typically developing children, the more improvement in skills they showed by age 6.

In other studies, Kuhl has found that social interactions accelerate language learning in babies. Infants use social cues, such as tracking adults` eye movements to learn the names of things, and must be interested in people to learn in this way. Paying attention to people is a way for babies to sort through all that is happening around them and serves as a gate to know what is important.

But with autism, social impairments impede children`s interest in, and ability to pick up on, social cues. They find themselves paying attention to many other things, especially objects as opposed to people.

Kuhl hopes that the new findings, published in PLOS ONE, will lead to brain measures that can be used much earlier in development - at 12 months or younger - to help identify children at risk for autism.