Health, Schools

The teenage brain on drugs

Feinstein Institute researcher delivers talk aimed at parents and students

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The drug addicts’ brain scans that Dr. Stephen Dewey takes appear in psychedelic shades of red, yellow, green and blue, each indicating a level of brain activity — or inactivity. Red means excited. Blue is dormant.

Dewey is the laboratory director for behavioral and molecular neuroimaging at the North Shore-LIJ Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. In that capacity, he’s put hundreds of addicts’ brains to the test — the positron emission tomography test, that is — seeking to understand precisely what happens to the mind when a pot smoker lights up or a heroin junkie shoots up.

And, he has found, it isn’t pretty.

Dewey presented the findings of his more than three decades of research at a talk for Bellmore-Merrick Central District parents and students at the Brookside School on Nov. 5. Roughly a hundred people turned out for the hour-and-a-half session. The Central District and Community Parent Center, headed by Bellmorite Wendy Tepfer, co-sponsored the event, titled, “The Effects of Drugs of Abuse on the Teen Brain.”

The presentation, Tepfer said, was “intended to empower teachers, parents, administrators and people in general with the knowledge and confidence to guide students through the adolescent and teenage years” substance-free.

Dopamine rush
Dewey opened by displaying a PET scan of a 5-day-old baby on a Smart Board. It was nearly all blue. The brain was at rest. Then he put up a 6-year-old boy’s brain scan. It was lit up in bright red. Young children’s brains, Dewey said, “are very active.” Finally, he showed a 30-year-old’s scan. It was a mix of reds and blues, with all manner of colors in between. It was active, but considerably less so than that of the 6-year-old.

Drugs cause addiction by over-stimulating the brain’s pleasure centers, sending dopamine, a neurotransmitter that regulates heartbeat, breathing and movement, cascading through its tangle of neural networks and on to the rest of the body.

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