Addiction, the brain, and how we can change
Exploring substance abuse disorders and therapies through neurobiology
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Published
Addiction, the brain, and how we can change
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Published
One in three people will meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder in their lifetime, and that's a lot of people. I don't think people realize that they may even have a problem with their alcohol use and that they might meet the criteria for that. And one reason it's really under-treated is because of that, it's just not recognized as being as big of a problem as it really is.
Dr. Anna Radke
Established in 1809, ºÚÁÏÉçÇø is located in Oxford, Ohio, with regional campuses in Hamilton and Middletown, a learning center in West Chester, and a European study center in Luxembourg. Interested in learning more about the Center for Neuroscience and Behavior? Visit their websites for more information.
President Greg Crawford
Hello. I'm Greg Crawford, president of ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, and welcome to "In Such a Place." The podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Today we are with Dr. Anna Radke, a leading expert in the neurology of addictive behaviors. Dr. Radke's research is advancing our understanding of addiction and addressing the broader societal need for better therapies to help those struggling with substance abuse disorders. ºÚÁÏÉçÇø to the podcast, Anna. We're so excited to have you with us today.
Dr. Anna Radke
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
President Greg Crawford
So before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how long you've been at Miami.
Dr. Anna Radke
Great. Well, I'm a neuroscientist; my PhD is in neuroscience. And here at Miami, I teach in the psychology department and in our neuroscience courses, in particular. I think I've been interested in the brain since I was very young. I don't know how that came to me, just something in my brain, I guess that it wanted to study itself. But when I was an undergraduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, I was actually majoring in biology, and because I was interested in neuroscience, I had to take psychology courses. And that was when I realized in my introduction to psychology course that we could specifically understand behavior by manipulating and changing the brain, and that we could make those direct links between the brain and our behavior. I think that really got me started on the path I'm on today.
President Greg Crawford
Did you do undergraduate research?
Dr. Anna Radke
I did, yeah, I did undergraduate research. I went to a small liberal arts school in Minnesota called St. Olaf College, and I worked in a lab with rats, where we were studying cells in the brain that help us know what direction we're facing in space. And I just really enjoyed it. So I went straight for my undergraduate work into a PhD in neuroscience.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's fantastic. So I got to ask this question, what is the "Mouse Bar"?
Dr. Anna Radke
Well, the Mouse Bar is what I jokingly call my lab, because it gets a little laugh out of people. But we study addictive behaviors, and a lot of that work, we are looking at alcohol drinking. The model we use to study how the brain controls alcohol drinking is the mouse, and we do that because there are a lot of things we couldn't study in people in an ethical way that we can do in animals. So the mouse bar is where we have rows of cages and animals drinking alcohol at all different times of day.
President Greg Crawford
And so the mice like alcohol, or do they ever over consume as a mouse?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, the mice actually don't consume to the levels that some people do. Primates seem to like alcohol more than mice, but we have lines of mice that have been selectively bred. So they're genetically selected for their preference for alcohol. The ones we work with most commonly don't usually pass out. We actually need them to be up and moving about to do different tasks. But there are lines of mice that will drink to that type of intoxication, where they are passed out in their cage.
President Greg Crawford
And for those that are never going to see a mouse that just had a drink, what behaviors do they walk funny? Do they wobble? Do they fall over? What are kind of some of the things that you observe?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, they look a lot like people do when they're intoxicated. They will stumble around and they move slowly. They have a hard time completing motor tasks and things like that. Most of our mice, we don't get them again to that point where they are quite that intoxicated. But when they do, they do all the funny things you might expect a person to do.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, my goodness. Well, your research explores how genetic sex and stress exposure can influence addiction vulnerability. How do you think that these findings might shape the future treatment options for addiction?
Dr. Anna Radke
I've really chosen to use vulnerability as a way to hopefully identify new pathways, molecules, and circuits in the brain that might be controlling these addictive behaviors. So if we can look at two different mice, one that was exposed to stress and one that wasn't, the ones that were stressed might drink more. And that gives us then comparison that we can make between those two and say, "Well, what's different about the stressed mouse?" Or in the case of genetic sex, we can look at animals with XX chromosomes versus XY, and we can see, "Okay, the XX animals are drinking more," and then start to look for things in the brain that explain that difference. So we're hoping that it's really an approach that will allow us to identify new targets, new things that nobody's ever. Looked at before that then might have some therapeutic value.
President Greg Crawford
One of your ongoing projects is studying the role of genetics on the X chromosome in alcohol use. Can you share more about the potential impact of these findings on addiction treatment and also how they might affect men and women differently?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, so we're just getting started with some of these studies. What we know so far is when we test our male versus our female mice, the female mice drink more than the male mice do. And using some genetic mouse models, we've been able to isolate part of that effect, not all of it, but part of it to these sex chromosomes. And so we think that there's something about having two X chromosomes that gives these animals some vulnerability, or maybe even in some types of behaviors protection, right? So that the genes you have matter, and so what we're doing now is we're trying to understand exactly what kind of vulnerability or resilience that X chromosome dosage, we call it, might have -- so having one versus two X chromosomes. We want to know if there's genes on those X chromosomes that are expressed at different rates in XX versus XY individuals. We want to know if those genes are influenced by alcohol. And then we're going to ultimately say, Well, what are the role of these genes in behavior? And the goal there would be to uncover some brand new genes that no one's ever looked at in the context of addiction, in the hope that maybe somewhere down the line, and our work is admittedly at the very beginning of this process, but that maybe somewhere down the line that leads to the discovery of some other target in the brain that we could develop a drug for that people could use to help in their recovery from addiction.
President Greg Crawford
Your current research on the X chromosome and alcohol intake is groundbreaking. Can you explain a bit more about why the X chromosome has been largely overlooked in addiction studies until now?
Dr. Anna Radke
Well, until recently, we weren't really even studying female animals in the context of addiction or many other behaviors in neuroscience. There really was a bias for many years where investigators thought that studying females would be too complicated because their hormones are different than males. It turns out that males and females both have hormones. It's complicated in both sexes, and we've recognized now that you can't just exclude half the population, because you don't want to have to think about some of that complexity. So that's one reason we've really not had the opportunity to even think about these sex differences because of that historical bias. When people have studied males versus females or these kinds of questions, they've primarily looked at the sex hormones, and there's a good reason for that. Those hormones control a lot of our behavioral differences. And I think that that's just been kind of the bias going in, that that's the most important thing to look at, and that combined with the fact that it was really hard to study the sex chromosomes, you know, individuals who have two X chromosomes are almost always also a gonadally female, meaning they have ovaries, and so teasing apart the differences is experimentally very difficult, and it hasn't been until recently that we've had sort of the genetic tools with the animals to be able to separate those things. Those are the reasons, and it's opened up a great opportunity for us to do things that I think really are groundbreaking and nobody's looked at before.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, your research sounds so exciting, and I can only imagine how undergraduates and graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs can play a role in your lab. Can you tell us how you involve them and maybe how a ºÚÁÏÉçÇø idea may have led to a surprising or an unexpected result?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, my favorite part of all this research actually, is getting the ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs involved. And I love that I can do this research here at Miami, because so many undergraduates can be involved in the work in addition to the graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs. So the undergraduates in my lab are running the Mouse Bar. They're the bartenders. They put the bottles full of alcohol on the cages and take them off when they need to come off. They're working with the animals. They do surgery in animals. Sometimes we remove the gonads from the animals, or we put something into the brain. And they're involved in all of those processes. The graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs are doing those things too, and they're very critical in supervising these projects and managing the day-to-day of the lab; none of this could happen without the ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs. And then they're also so creative; they bring their own ideas to the table. So in addition to all this work I've been talking about, we have other lines of research that aren't about sex differences, that are about other things. Last year, I had a ºÚÁÏÉçÇø who she's now in a public health program, getting her master's in public health. She was very interested in the social determinants of health and understanding how environmental toxins could affect the brain and behavior. And so she came to me and said, I want to study lead exposure. I want to see if animals exposed to lead could be more likely to consume, you know, have more vulnerability for addiction. And I thought that was a great idea. I would never have thought of it. I checked the literature; nobody's really doing this. And she presented a poster at our premier neuroscience conference last fall, and I'm hoping we can keep going with that work. So she's started a whole new line of research in my lab.
President Greg Crawford
That's great. That's a thrill for the undergraduates to be on publications and also present their work at conferences.
Dr. Anna Radke
Absolutely.
President Greg Crawford
So with the growing opioid crisis and the impact of alcohol use disorders, how do you think your research could contribute to addressing these public health challenges.
Dr. Anna Radke
I do think that our research is at the beginning of what is a long process. So I do pre-clinical research. We are involved in trying to do the basic science of understanding how does the brain produce these addictive behaviors? And then there's a lot of work that has to happen after us to get, hopefully to some sort of clinical trial, but that's our hope that therapies and pharmacological treatments could eventually come out of this type of work. I also think it's just important for raising awareness and helping people understand that addiction isn't just a choice, and once people have been exposed to drugs and are diagnosed with something like an alcohol use disorder or a substance use disorder, in a lot of ways, they really feel their behaviors out of their control. And when we can show people that with the science that this is a real change in the brain that happens, I think it helps people understand that better.
President Greg Crawford
And can you tell us a little bit about when you're working on animal models and you're and you're doing your studies at what point, or is it done in parallel, when somebody in the clinic maybe picks up similar types of studies on human beings and takes them further or to the clinic, or translates them to the bedside, so to speak?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, absolutely. So we would hope that the people who are in other fields like drug development or clinical trials are reading the pre-clinical literature. And one example of that would be one of the primary pharmacological treatments for alcohol use disorder is Naltrexone, which is also very similar to Narcan, which is used to treat opioid overdoses, but it's a long acting antagonist to the mu opioid receptor, and it's prescribed for people who are struggling with their alcohol use. And that came from work like mine, not mine directly. It was before mine time, but the type of work where we were able to show that the mu opioid receptor is really important in alcohol drinking that mice without that receptor don't drink alcohol at the same levels. And that type of work was then picked up and people developed, you know, these drugs that could target that receptor, and tried it out in people, and found that it is helpful to help people control their drinking. So that's our hope, that that process can be repeated, maybe from my work or other people in my field.
President Greg Crawford
That's a great example of how sort of animal models are translated into sort of human benefit.
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
So you've explored now exposure to stress and how that might affect alcohol and drug intake. How does stress change the brain in ways that make people more susceptible to addictive behaviors?
Dr. Anna Radke
We know that exposure to stress, maybe early in your life or recently, make people more likely to transition from just this casual use to what we call compulsive use, or this uncontrollable use. And in fact, that people who drink to cope, there's different types of alcohol drinking. There's drinking because it's fun and you're out with your friends. And then there's what we call drinking to cope, which is to deal with stress, that is actually the most risky type of drinking. So when you drink to cope and relieve your negative emotion to make yourself sort of feel better, you're much more likely to have problems with your alcohol use. And we've studied this in the context of early life stress with my colleague Jen Quinn in psychology, and she has mouse and rat models of exposing these animals to stress when they're very young, kind of toddler age. And then we've tested them in adulthood to look at their vulnerability and see they're much more likely to show this addictive like behavior.
President Greg Crawford
And then in a world we have so much addiction, it's so prevalent. What do you think is the biggest misconception the general public has about the biological factors driving addiction?
Dr. Anna Radke
I definitely still come across the misconception that drug and alcohol addiction is just a choice and something people can will their way out of. You know, it certainly involves making good decisions, and you have to want to get better, but we know that alcohol use disorder, substance use disorder, is also a brain disease. Your brain physically changes, and it makes it very, very challenging to treat, and that's why we need to do the type of work that I'm doing, because we do have some good treatments for alcohol use disorder. If you're struggling, definitely go talk to your physician. There are good options out there, but we have a long way to go, I think, in really being able to help people get better. And this is such a prevalent issue, I think that's the other thing that maybe people don't realize. A statistic that always comes to mind is that one in three people will meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder in their lifetime, and that's a lot of people. And I don't think people realize that they may even have a problem with their alcohol use and that they might meet the criteria for that and one reason it's really under treated is because of that, it's just not recognized as being as big of a problem as it really is.
President Greg Crawford
There's a lot of sort of great things going on in science today, from quantum computing to artificial intelligence to space travel to drones and so forth. But brain, studying the brain is probably one of those frontiers in science that's taking place today, and you're in that field. And you mentioned to me earlier that a brain tissue the size of a grain of a piece of sand contains about 1 billion neural connections. How does that complexity impact how we study brain diseases, including addiction?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, I think it highlights what a major challenge this is that we're trying to solve, right? It's the greatest mystery out there. It's one reason I want to be involved in this field is studying the human brain. We know we're just having this tiny sliver of insight into what's going on there. And I think it means we have to recognize that the approaches we're taking are really kind of sledge hammer-type approaches. The vast complexity of the brain isn't something we can model currently, and all we can do is push these big levers and see what changes we get out of it. But that makes it really fun, because we're, I think we're at the start of a field that, you know is less than 100 years old and has a long way to go, and is growing by leaps and bounds due to all the new technologies. And I think as these other fields you mentioned even pick up, it'll really advance some of our ability to answer questions about the nervous system as well.
President Greg Crawford
And with being on sort of the frontier of studying the brain, can you tell us some of the biggest opportunities or breakthroughs you think you may see in the future in understanding addiction, say, over the next five or 10 years?
Dr. Anna Radke
I think we need to probably rely on some of these computing powers that are up and coming. We need to model the brain better, because we don't have the ability to fully understand it ourselves. That's this kind of conundrum that I'm not sure the brain is complicated enough to understand its own complexity, and that means that better models and trying to understand the brain as a whole are going to be really important. I think more of a network approach to understanding all these interconnections is what's really going to lead to some new breakthroughs. Because what we've been doing is very much looking at one little piece at a time, and we need a way to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
President Greg Crawford
Well, a big macro question for you, what do you think is the most compelling argument for the importance of studying fields like neuroscience, the brain in today's society?
Dr. Anna Radke
So one thing I see in our ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs that sign up for neuroscience is that they come from all different fields. So we have a lot of psychology majors, obviously biology, but we get ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs from the business school, music, all kinds of different places. And I think that speaks to how neuroscience, because we're studying the brain and we're trying to understand human behavior and how the nervous system works, is really broadly applicable. So it impacts all kinds of medical fields and all kinds of fields that work with people directly. It gets into technology. So, you know, neuroscience is something that I always say is really for everyone, and I would like everyone on campus to have a little bit of neuroscience education, because I think understanding our brain is understanding ourself, and that's really important.
President Greg Crawford
That's fantastic. This holds the nature of transdisciplinarity, of crossing disciplines. Can you tell us a little bit about how you learn about other disciplines as you work through some of these sort of brain science projects that you're researching today, and learning just from different people in different fields, and how you kind of bring it all together, because it really, truly is an interdisciplinary area of research?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, it really is. And even just new projects I've started in my lab, I've had to go into a new field and suddenly learn more about genetics or endocrinology. And so I'm in contact with, you know, other folks here at Miami, we have a Center for Neuroscience and Behavior, and that helps bring us together, and obviously going to conferences in my field, and sometimes just picking up readings that, you know, I'm not sure what this is about, but let me see if I can read it and start to learn about it. And then again, bringing in ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs from different fields and getting them into my lab, I learned a lot from them, actually, that way.
President Greg Crawford
That's great. And so Miami is known for the teacher, scholar model. And so why don't you tell us a little bit about maybe how you inserted some of this groundbreaking research into some of your classes?
Dr. Anna Radke
Oh, absolutely. One of my favorite things to do is involve undergraduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs in my research. And I've been fortunate to be part of courses that bring research directly into the classroom, and we call these structured research experiences. We have a class in the psychology department where we bring in junior and senior ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who haven't had the chance to get involved in research yet, and they spend a year with us. We take the first semester to teach them all about what research is and plan out an experiment. They get to read the literature and decide what they want to test, and then we bring them in the lab and we train them, and in the spring semester, they do that experiment. And so that's been amazing to combine my research with that class, and it allows me to bring in so many more ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs than I could otherwise, and those ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs have published papers. You know, we have papers that have come out of that class, and they're presenting at conferences. So that's really kind of the most rewarding part of my job here,
President Greg Crawford
That's an amazing experience for undergraduates. Well, this has been an incredibly exciting conversation. Your research has the ability to change lives of so many people, and I'm so excited to see in the future where all this heads. So a big thank you for being here. Dr. Anna Radke!
Dr. Anna Radke
Thank you so much for having me.
President Greg Crawford
You're awesome! Thank you.
Dr. Anna Radke
Was that okay?
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that was great. You got some exciting stuff going on. My goodness, I want to be a neuroscientist.
Producers
Yeah!
President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of in such a place from ºÚÁÏÉçÇø. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found.
Hello. I'm Greg Crawford, president of ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, and welcome to "In Such a Place." The podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Today we are with Dr. Anna Radke, a leading expert in the neurology of addictive behaviors. Dr. Radke's research is advancing our understanding of addiction and addressing the broader societal need for better therapies to help those struggling with substance abuse disorders. ºÚÁÏÉçÇø to the podcast, Anna. We're so excited to have you with us today.
Dr. Anna Radke
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
President Greg Crawford
So before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how long you've been at Miami.
Dr. Anna Radke
Great. Well, I'm a neuroscientist; my PhD is in neuroscience. And here at Miami, I teach in the psychology department and in our neuroscience courses, in particular. I think I've been interested in the brain since I was very young. I don't know how that came to me, just something in my brain, I guess that it wanted to study itself. But when I was an undergraduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, I was actually majoring in biology, and because I was interested in neuroscience, I had to take psychology courses. And that was when I realized in my introduction to psychology course that we could specifically understand behavior by manipulating and changing the brain, and that we could make those direct links between the brain and our behavior. I think that really got me started on the path I'm on today.
President Greg Crawford
Did you do undergraduate research?
Dr. Anna Radke
I did, yeah, I did undergraduate research. I went to a small liberal arts school in Minnesota called St. Olaf College, and I worked in a lab with rats, where we were studying cells in the brain that help us know what direction we're facing in space. And I just really enjoyed it. So I went straight for my undergraduate work into a PhD in neuroscience.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's fantastic. So I got to ask this question, what is the "Mouse Bar"?
Dr. Anna Radke
Well, the Mouse Bar is what I jokingly call my lab, because it gets a little laugh out of people. But we study addictive behaviors, and a lot of that work, we are looking at alcohol drinking. The model we use to study how the brain controls alcohol drinking is the mouse, and we do that because there are a lot of things we couldn't study in people in an ethical way that we can do in animals. So the mouse bar is where we have rows of cages and animals drinking alcohol at all different times of day.
President Greg Crawford
And so the mice like alcohol, or do they ever over consume as a mouse?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, the mice actually don't consume to the levels that some people do. Primates seem to like alcohol more than mice, but we have lines of mice that have been selectively bred. So they're genetically selected for their preference for alcohol. The ones we work with most commonly don't usually pass out. We actually need them to be up and moving about to do different tasks. But there are lines of mice that will drink to that type of intoxication, where they are passed out in their cage.
President Greg Crawford
And for those that are never going to see a mouse that just had a drink, what behaviors do they walk funny? Do they wobble? Do they fall over? What are kind of some of the things that you observe?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, they look a lot like people do when they're intoxicated. They will stumble around and they move slowly. They have a hard time completing motor tasks and things like that. Most of our mice, we don't get them again to that point where they are quite that intoxicated. But when they do, they do all the funny things you might expect a person to do.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, my goodness. Well, your research explores how genetic sex and stress exposure can influence addiction vulnerability. How do you think that these findings might shape the future treatment options for addiction?
Dr. Anna Radke
I've really chosen to use vulnerability as a way to hopefully identify new pathways, molecules, and circuits in the brain that might be controlling these addictive behaviors. So if we can look at two different mice, one that was exposed to stress and one that wasn't, the ones that were stressed might drink more. And that gives us then comparison that we can make between those two and say, "Well, what's different about the stressed mouse?" Or in the case of genetic sex, we can look at animals with XX chromosomes versus XY, and we can see, "Okay, the XX animals are drinking more," and then start to look for things in the brain that explain that difference. So we're hoping that it's really an approach that will allow us to identify new targets, new things that nobody's ever. Looked at before that then might have some therapeutic value.
President Greg Crawford
One of your ongoing projects is studying the role of genetics on the X chromosome in alcohol use. Can you share more about the potential impact of these findings on addiction treatment and also how they might affect men and women differently?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, so we're just getting started with some of these studies. What we know so far is when we test our male versus our female mice, the female mice drink more than the male mice do. And using some genetic mouse models, we've been able to isolate part of that effect, not all of it, but part of it to these sex chromosomes. And so we think that there's something about having two X chromosomes that gives these animals some vulnerability, or maybe even in some types of behaviors protection, right? So that the genes you have matter, and so what we're doing now is we're trying to understand exactly what kind of vulnerability or resilience that X chromosome dosage, we call it, might have -- so having one versus two X chromosomes. We want to know if there's genes on those X chromosomes that are expressed at different rates in XX versus XY individuals. We want to know if those genes are influenced by alcohol. And then we're going to ultimately say, Well, what are the role of these genes in behavior? And the goal there would be to uncover some brand new genes that no one's ever looked at in the context of addiction, in the hope that maybe somewhere down the line, and our work is admittedly at the very beginning of this process, but that maybe somewhere down the line that leads to the discovery of some other target in the brain that we could develop a drug for that people could use to help in their recovery from addiction.
President Greg Crawford
Your current research on the X chromosome and alcohol intake is groundbreaking. Can you explain a bit more about why the X chromosome has been largely overlooked in addiction studies until now?
Dr. Anna Radke
Well, until recently, we weren't really even studying female animals in the context of addiction or many other behaviors in neuroscience. There really was a bias for many years where investigators thought that studying females would be too complicated because their hormones are different than males. It turns out that males and females both have hormones. It's complicated in both sexes, and we've recognized now that you can't just exclude half the population, because you don't want to have to think about some of that complexity. So that's one reason we've really not had the opportunity to even think about these sex differences because of that historical bias. When people have studied males versus females or these kinds of questions, they've primarily looked at the sex hormones, and there's a good reason for that. Those hormones control a lot of our behavioral differences. And I think that that's just been kind of the bias going in, that that's the most important thing to look at, and that combined with the fact that it was really hard to study the sex chromosomes, you know, individuals who have two X chromosomes are almost always also a gonadally female, meaning they have ovaries, and so teasing apart the differences is experimentally very difficult, and it hasn't been until recently that we've had sort of the genetic tools with the animals to be able to separate those things. Those are the reasons, and it's opened up a great opportunity for us to do things that I think really are groundbreaking and nobody's looked at before.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, your research sounds so exciting, and I can only imagine how undergraduates and graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs can play a role in your lab. Can you tell us how you involve them and maybe how a ºÚÁÏÉçÇø idea may have led to a surprising or an unexpected result?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, my favorite part of all this research actually, is getting the ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs involved. And I love that I can do this research here at Miami, because so many undergraduates can be involved in the work in addition to the graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs. So the undergraduates in my lab are running the Mouse Bar. They're the bartenders. They put the bottles full of alcohol on the cages and take them off when they need to come off. They're working with the animals. They do surgery in animals. Sometimes we remove the gonads from the animals, or we put something into the brain. And they're involved in all of those processes. The graduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs are doing those things too, and they're very critical in supervising these projects and managing the day-to-day of the lab; none of this could happen without the ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs. And then they're also so creative; they bring their own ideas to the table. So in addition to all this work I've been talking about, we have other lines of research that aren't about sex differences, that are about other things. Last year, I had a ºÚÁÏÉçÇø who she's now in a public health program, getting her master's in public health. She was very interested in the social determinants of health and understanding how environmental toxins could affect the brain and behavior. And so she came to me and said, I want to study lead exposure. I want to see if animals exposed to lead could be more likely to consume, you know, have more vulnerability for addiction. And I thought that was a great idea. I would never have thought of it. I checked the literature; nobody's really doing this. And she presented a poster at our premier neuroscience conference last fall, and I'm hoping we can keep going with that work. So she's started a whole new line of research in my lab.
President Greg Crawford
That's great. That's a thrill for the undergraduates to be on publications and also present their work at conferences.
Dr. Anna Radke
Absolutely.
President Greg Crawford
So with the growing opioid crisis and the impact of alcohol use disorders, how do you think your research could contribute to addressing these public health challenges.
Dr. Anna Radke
I do think that our research is at the beginning of what is a long process. So I do pre-clinical research. We are involved in trying to do the basic science of understanding how does the brain produce these addictive behaviors? And then there's a lot of work that has to happen after us to get, hopefully to some sort of clinical trial, but that's our hope that therapies and pharmacological treatments could eventually come out of this type of work. I also think it's just important for raising awareness and helping people understand that addiction isn't just a choice, and once people have been exposed to drugs and are diagnosed with something like an alcohol use disorder or a substance use disorder, in a lot of ways, they really feel their behaviors out of their control. And when we can show people that with the science that this is a real change in the brain that happens, I think it helps people understand that better.
President Greg Crawford
And can you tell us a little bit about when you're working on animal models and you're and you're doing your studies at what point, or is it done in parallel, when somebody in the clinic maybe picks up similar types of studies on human beings and takes them further or to the clinic, or translates them to the bedside, so to speak?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, absolutely. So we would hope that the people who are in other fields like drug development or clinical trials are reading the pre-clinical literature. And one example of that would be one of the primary pharmacological treatments for alcohol use disorder is Naltrexone, which is also very similar to Narcan, which is used to treat opioid overdoses, but it's a long acting antagonist to the mu opioid receptor, and it's prescribed for people who are struggling with their alcohol use. And that came from work like mine, not mine directly. It was before mine time, but the type of work where we were able to show that the mu opioid receptor is really important in alcohol drinking that mice without that receptor don't drink alcohol at the same levels. And that type of work was then picked up and people developed, you know, these drugs that could target that receptor, and tried it out in people, and found that it is helpful to help people control their drinking. So that's our hope, that that process can be repeated, maybe from my work or other people in my field.
President Greg Crawford
That's a great example of how sort of animal models are translated into sort of human benefit.
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
So you've explored now exposure to stress and how that might affect alcohol and drug intake. How does stress change the brain in ways that make people more susceptible to addictive behaviors?
Dr. Anna Radke
We know that exposure to stress, maybe early in your life or recently, make people more likely to transition from just this casual use to what we call compulsive use, or this uncontrollable use. And in fact, that people who drink to cope, there's different types of alcohol drinking. There's drinking because it's fun and you're out with your friends. And then there's what we call drinking to cope, which is to deal with stress, that is actually the most risky type of drinking. So when you drink to cope and relieve your negative emotion to make yourself sort of feel better, you're much more likely to have problems with your alcohol use. And we've studied this in the context of early life stress with my colleague Jen Quinn in psychology, and she has mouse and rat models of exposing these animals to stress when they're very young, kind of toddler age. And then we've tested them in adulthood to look at their vulnerability and see they're much more likely to show this addictive like behavior.
President Greg Crawford
And then in a world we have so much addiction, it's so prevalent. What do you think is the biggest misconception the general public has about the biological factors driving addiction?
Dr. Anna Radke
I definitely still come across the misconception that drug and alcohol addiction is just a choice and something people can will their way out of. You know, it certainly involves making good decisions, and you have to want to get better, but we know that alcohol use disorder, substance use disorder, is also a brain disease. Your brain physically changes, and it makes it very, very challenging to treat, and that's why we need to do the type of work that I'm doing, because we do have some good treatments for alcohol use disorder. If you're struggling, definitely go talk to your physician. There are good options out there, but we have a long way to go, I think, in really being able to help people get better. And this is such a prevalent issue, I think that's the other thing that maybe people don't realize. A statistic that always comes to mind is that one in three people will meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder in their lifetime, and that's a lot of people. And I don't think people realize that they may even have a problem with their alcohol use and that they might meet the criteria for that and one reason it's really under treated is because of that, it's just not recognized as being as big of a problem as it really is.
President Greg Crawford
There's a lot of sort of great things going on in science today, from quantum computing to artificial intelligence to space travel to drones and so forth. But brain, studying the brain is probably one of those frontiers in science that's taking place today, and you're in that field. And you mentioned to me earlier that a brain tissue the size of a grain of a piece of sand contains about 1 billion neural connections. How does that complexity impact how we study brain diseases, including addiction?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, I think it highlights what a major challenge this is that we're trying to solve, right? It's the greatest mystery out there. It's one reason I want to be involved in this field is studying the human brain. We know we're just having this tiny sliver of insight into what's going on there. And I think it means we have to recognize that the approaches we're taking are really kind of sledge hammer-type approaches. The vast complexity of the brain isn't something we can model currently, and all we can do is push these big levers and see what changes we get out of it. But that makes it really fun, because we're, I think we're at the start of a field that, you know is less than 100 years old and has a long way to go, and is growing by leaps and bounds due to all the new technologies. And I think as these other fields you mentioned even pick up, it'll really advance some of our ability to answer questions about the nervous system as well.
President Greg Crawford
And with being on sort of the frontier of studying the brain, can you tell us some of the biggest opportunities or breakthroughs you think you may see in the future in understanding addiction, say, over the next five or 10 years?
Dr. Anna Radke
I think we need to probably rely on some of these computing powers that are up and coming. We need to model the brain better, because we don't have the ability to fully understand it ourselves. That's this kind of conundrum that I'm not sure the brain is complicated enough to understand its own complexity, and that means that better models and trying to understand the brain as a whole are going to be really important. I think more of a network approach to understanding all these interconnections is what's really going to lead to some new breakthroughs. Because what we've been doing is very much looking at one little piece at a time, and we need a way to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
President Greg Crawford
Well, a big macro question for you, what do you think is the most compelling argument for the importance of studying fields like neuroscience, the brain in today's society?
Dr. Anna Radke
So one thing I see in our ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs that sign up for neuroscience is that they come from all different fields. So we have a lot of psychology majors, obviously biology, but we get ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs from the business school, music, all kinds of different places. And I think that speaks to how neuroscience, because we're studying the brain and we're trying to understand human behavior and how the nervous system works, is really broadly applicable. So it impacts all kinds of medical fields and all kinds of fields that work with people directly. It gets into technology. So, you know, neuroscience is something that I always say is really for everyone, and I would like everyone on campus to have a little bit of neuroscience education, because I think understanding our brain is understanding ourself, and that's really important.
President Greg Crawford
That's fantastic. This holds the nature of transdisciplinarity, of crossing disciplines. Can you tell us a little bit about how you learn about other disciplines as you work through some of these sort of brain science projects that you're researching today, and learning just from different people in different fields, and how you kind of bring it all together, because it really, truly is an interdisciplinary area of research?
Dr. Anna Radke
Yeah, it really is. And even just new projects I've started in my lab, I've had to go into a new field and suddenly learn more about genetics or endocrinology. And so I'm in contact with, you know, other folks here at Miami, we have a Center for Neuroscience and Behavior, and that helps bring us together, and obviously going to conferences in my field, and sometimes just picking up readings that, you know, I'm not sure what this is about, but let me see if I can read it and start to learn about it. And then again, bringing in ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs from different fields and getting them into my lab, I learned a lot from them, actually, that way.
President Greg Crawford
That's great. And so Miami is known for the teacher, scholar model. And so why don't you tell us a little bit about maybe how you inserted some of this groundbreaking research into some of your classes?
Dr. Anna Radke
Oh, absolutely. One of my favorite things to do is involve undergraduate ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs in my research. And I've been fortunate to be part of courses that bring research directly into the classroom, and we call these structured research experiences. We have a class in the psychology department where we bring in junior and senior ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who haven't had the chance to get involved in research yet, and they spend a year with us. We take the first semester to teach them all about what research is and plan out an experiment. They get to read the literature and decide what they want to test, and then we bring them in the lab and we train them, and in the spring semester, they do that experiment. And so that's been amazing to combine my research with that class, and it allows me to bring in so many more ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs than I could otherwise, and those ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs have published papers. You know, we have papers that have come out of that class, and they're presenting at conferences. So that's really kind of the most rewarding part of my job here,
President Greg Crawford
That's an amazing experience for undergraduates. Well, this has been an incredibly exciting conversation. Your research has the ability to change lives of so many people, and I'm so excited to see in the future where all this heads. So a big thank you for being here. Dr. Anna Radke!
Dr. Anna Radke
Thank you so much for having me.
President Greg Crawford
You're awesome! Thank you.
Dr. Anna Radke
Was that okay?
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that was great. You got some exciting stuff going on. My goodness, I want to be a neuroscientist.
Producers
Yeah!
President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of in such a place from ºÚÁÏÉçÇø. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found.