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A “pleasure receptor” in your brain may actually be a large contributing factor in alcoholism and alcohol abuse according to a new study by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

“Although the pathway to alcoholism is influenced by many factors, our findings affirm that individuals who possess this receptor variant may experience enhanced pleasurable effects from alcohol that could increase their risk for developing alcohol abuse and dependence,” notes Markus Heilig, M.D., Ph.D., NIAAA Clinical Director and the study’s senior author.

What does this mean? Everybody has pleasure receptors in their brains to access and determine the amount of pleasure you feel towards different experiences. Some people, for instance, enjoy having fingers run through their hair or the spine-tingling feeling of riding a roller coaster. Others would not describe either of these as “pleasurable.”

There are a group of people, however, who have a variation in these brain receptors that make the effects of alcohol consumption seem especially pleasurable — more so than the average person. People with this variant can be highly susceptible to future problems with alcohol.

Additional alcohol research information and publications are available at www.niaaa.nih.gov. And a report on the findings from this study is published in the March, 2007 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

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