Scans show cocaine users have ‘lower brain activity’

THE comparison between the scans are stark.

The first scan is that of people who don’t take cocaine. It shows two large bright red areas in parts of the brain responsible for impulse behaviour. In contrast, the second and third set of images, are of problem cocaine users. It shows much smaller areas highlighted in red. Trinity College Dublin researcher Dr Hugh Garavan said this shows lower brain activity in these parts of the brain among cocaine users.

A final scan Dr Garavan shows is for a part of the brain responsible for monitoring behaviour. This allows a person to assess the riskiness of their behaviour. The sophisticated machine at the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin is a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which Dr Garavan said is the country’s only research-dedicated machine. The scan measures blood flow, which is an indirect measure of neural activity.