Drug Addiction
Drug addiction is a chronic brain disease caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. One of the main environmental factors that can induce drug addiction is stress. An overwhelming amount of stress can lead to a stress response in a human's genes. Concerning genetic factors, research by Orna Levran et al. has shown that certain SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms, in genes have association with drug addiction, specifically heroin and cocaine addiction in African Americans.
This webpage is based on the paper, "Drug addiction and stress-response genetic variability: association study in African Americans" by Orna Levran, Matthew Randesi, Yi Li, Jurg Ott, Miriam Adelson and Mary Jeanne Kreek. The authors used African Americans as their model organism in this study. This is because the association between polymorphisms in stress‐related genes and specific drug addictions in populations of African ancestry are not as well known as in populations from other ancestry.