People with alcohol dependency lack important enzyme
The discovery is now published in the number-one ranked psychiatric journal from the Nature Publishing Group, and could mean completely new possibilities for treating alcoholism. "We've worked hard for this. The enzyme, PRDM2 , has previously been studied in cancer research, but we didn't know that it has a function in the brain," says Markus Heilig, professor of psychiatry and head of the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience (CSAN) at Linköping University. He and his research group are linking together research into alcoholism and other addictive illnesses with advanced brain research. It has long been suspected that people with alcohol dependence have impaired function in the frontal lobes of the brain, but the underlying biological mechanisms have not been known. The research team behind the paper, which includes researchers from both Linköping University and University of Miami, is the first to identify this molecular mechanism. If frontal functio...