Natural rewarding and drug rewarding

In the brain of animals and humans there is a rewarding mechanism to encourage the behavior that is beneficial for the living of the individual and for the prolongation of the generation. However, when this system is being abused by drugs of addiction, chronic adaptive changes may occur that would cause serious damage to the organism. The neural substrate of the rewarding system is mainly based on the dopaminergic pathway, starting from the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain and ended in the nucleus accumbens of the limbic brain. This pathway serves both natural rewarding such as food and sex as well as drug rewarding such as heroin and cocaine. This paper is aimed to discuss the similarities and differences between the natural and drug-induced rewarding in an attempt to block the latter without affecting the former.PubMed02103-83