Until indoor smoking bans started popping up in cities across the country in recent years, smoke-filled bars were a fixture of American culture, smoking and drinking entwined like the peanut butter and jelly of vices. If you were a casual scientist of the street, you might have hypothesized that there was something meaningful behind the common sight of the barfly with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And laboratory research has mostly supported that anecdotal evidence, with study after study showing that alcohol does in fact promote smoking behavior, while larger surveys have found alcoholics more likely to be smokers and vice versa. But where do the effects of a beer and a cigarette meet in the brain, such that ordering up one raises a person’s desire to partake of the other?

That’s been one of the questions studied in the Clinical Addictions Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where director Andrea King has examined the phenomenon of alcohol-induced smoking. The studies put the spotlight on an interesting population of smokers - not the pack-a-day regulars, but those who smoke “socially,” a few cigarettes on nights out on the town with friends. That’s a demographic that hasn’t received as much study as addicted smokers, King said, in part due to psychiatric guidelines that classified people as either smokers or non-smokers with no space for people in the gray areas.

“Older studies wouldn’t even ask how frequently subjects smoked; if they smoke, they must be addicted, daily smokers,” said King, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience. “But we see this percent that seems to be increasing in subsequent surveys…about 20-30 percent would be non-daily smokers. Some of these people may continue and become vulnerable to being a chronic habitual user, or this may be a new subclass of smokers.”

King was drawn to social, alcohol-induced smoking behavior when she was attempting to recruit heavy drinkers who were not smokers for a control group, a task she found exceptionally difficult. With rates of smoking among alcoholics as high as 75 percent, the non-smoking drinker was a rare breed, so King decided to flip it around to study what causes the two behaviors to frequently co-exist.

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Have you heard of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine? Maybe its acronym MDMA? Or perhaps its more common street name, ecstasy? Though it’s a drug that has been used recreationally for decades, long enough to be the inspiration for books and songs, ecstasy remains scientifically mysterious, with most of the research focusing on harmful long-term effects to users’ brains. Left unanswered is a key question about ecstasy: why do people take it?

Far less research has been devoted to ecstasy’s unusual effects, which include an increased sense of friendliness, empathy and sociability in users. MDMA is closely related chemically to the drugs methamphetamine and mescaline, but the psychological effects of those drugs are very different: hallucinogen and stimulant effects may be caused by ecstasy, but are not the primary desired effects people seek out by taking the drug.

Feelings of empathy and sociability are also difficult concepts to measure in animals, where most drug research is still performed for legal and ethical reasons. How do you determine whether MDMA makes a rat “friendlier” with other rats? One method, employed in a 2005 study, measured the likelihood of rats to lie next to each other, sort of a cuddle test. Sure enough, a dose of MDMA increased the likelihood that rats who had not previously met would lie next to each other.

But the human relevance of watching rats cuddle is, suffice to say, limited. So Gillinder Bedi, as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of University of Chicago professor of psychiatry Harriet de Wit, designed experiments to test the effects of ecstasy on people’s subjective feelings and the way their brains process the emotions of other people. The first of two papers on the subject was published last week in the journal Psychopharmacology.

“There is only so much you can glean about social experiences from an animal,” Bedi said via e-mail from Australia. “I think it is a fascinating drug in terms of its effects on social behavior and function, in particular given that these social effects appear to be a fundamental part of the reinforcing effects of the drug. So, in this way ecstasy gives us a window into a broader issue, which is how drug effects and social factors interact at a more biological level, and whether such interactions are an important part of why people use drugs.” read more

Decades of research advances have made depression less mysterious and less stigmatized in most circles, accepted as a neurobiological disorder rather than a more abstract (and untreatable) entity. But some news about depression remains surprising, at least to people outside the realm of psychiatry. Tuesday’s newspaper had one such example: a new study out of Washington University in St. Louis following a group of clinically depressed and young – very young – children, between the ages of 3 and 6.

Diagnosing a preschool child with major depressive disorder was a new concept to me. But it turns out that it’s relatively old news to psychiatrists, who have been studying the diagnosis and treatment of early childhood depression cases since at least the mid-1980’s. Prior to that, even practitioners  had trouble grappling with the idea of toddlers and kindergartners suffering from a traditionally “adult” disorder like depression, said Sharon Hirsch, section chief for child and adolescent psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“People used to have a different concept about kids,” Hirsch said. “They figured, from a developmental point of view, that if you didn’t understand abstract concepts – if you only knew right and wrong, black and white – you didn’t have to worry about the larger concepts in life. Therefore, you weren’t really capable of becoming depressed, because you were only focused on food and basic necessities, which are all provided for you, so what is there to get depressed about?”

But as theories of depression focused less on psychoanalysis and more on neurochemical causes, researchers began asking whether the brains of very young children might be vulnerable to mood disorders such as depression. They found that depression does strike kids, but it takes distinct physical and emotional forms.

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