The keys associated with the urge to smoke, how to do while waiting for someone, generates the need to consume snuff and causes relapses in people who want to quit . Smokers use many different methods to reduce your urge to smoke, among which are pharmacological treatments such as nicotine patches or alternative approaches such as hypnosis or acupuncture.
Scientists have long suspected that these different methods so they could share a common mechanism of operation , as is the reduction of brain activity responsible for the urge to smoke. The hypothesis is supported by brain imaging studies that show the activation of several brain regions during the time it takes a cigarette, which involves regions of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system, a brain circuit associated with emotion.
Anxiety
Based on these imaging studies, the scientists manipulated this "circuit of anxiety", which uses electromagnetic currents to address specific or general areas of the brain. Depending on the frequency used, can stimulate or depress brain activity. The researchers found that repeated delivery of superior frontal TMS to turn at high frequency (10Hz) increases the urge to smoke a cigarette.
According to one of the authors of this study, Jed Rose, "directly stimulate the frontal region of the brain using magnetic fields and show that this increased the need for cigarette smokers to observe key moments related to smoking. By better understanding how the brain influences the urge to smoke, they could develop strategies to block these responses and develop more effective treatments against smoking, "he says.
However, these investigators did not demonstrate that low frequency stimulation (1Hz) reduced the urge to smoke. Thus, a potential intervention that reduced activation of this circuit will not produce the opposite effect. It will therefore be necessary to further investigate these effects.
