Study finds - Brain differences in college-aged occasional drug users

According to the research conducted at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have stated that the impaired neuronal activities in different parts of the brain are associated with the preventative functioning among the occasional 18 to 24 years old youngsters involved in stimulant drugs including cocaine, amphetamines and prescription drugs such as Adderall. The brain differences are found by using the functional magnetic resonance imaging that are supposed to represent the internal hard wiring and can lead to drug addiction later. The study is published in Journal of Neuroscience. One of the senior co-author, Martin Paulus, MD, professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego explains, “If you show me 100 college students and tell me which ones have taken stimulants a dozen times, I can tell you those students' brains are different. Our study is telling us, it's not 'this is your brain on drugs,' it's 'this is the brain that does drugs.”