Western’s Jeff Grimm Gets New $100,000 Grant from National Institutes of Health for his Research on Addictions and Cravings

Western Washington University Professor of Psychology Jeff Grimm has received a new $100,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health furthering his research into the similarities between drug addiction and the body’s craving for sugar.

“Sugar can be just as habit-forming as cocaine, methamphetamine or heroin,” he said. “Our brains learn to covet sugar, and, once given it, release the same chemical, dopamine, that is increased by most abused drugs.”

The new grant is a piggyback onto a previous 3-year, $300,000 grant from the NIH, and for the first time will allow him to examine in a rat model how females respond differently to cravings than males do.

“What the baseline numbers tell us now is that there are differences for humans in the way the two sexes experience addiction,” he said. “For example, we know that males are more likely to become addicted to alcohol and illicit drugs than females. And while the rate is lower in females, they tend to have more serious levels of addiction, including experiencing more frequent and intense craving. Getting into the how and why of these numbers is what we’re working on.”

One aspect of the new study is to eventually examine how hormones – both in males and females – affect craving.  The research is part of a new directive from the NIH that all studies from now on need to look at both sexes, not just the perceived easier-to-measure male population.

“Males have typically been used because of the general perception that their bodies compared to females undergo less change during the course of any time period, for example due to reproductive hormone cyclicity in females, thereby introducing less error into research studies,” he said. “That may have been a pragmatic approach in the past, but if the goal is to understand disease in humans we need to validate findings in both basic and clinical research in both sexes.”

The NIH has funded Grimm’s research on a renewing-grant basis since 2003.

For more information, contact Jeff Grimm, Western Washington University professor of Psychology, at (360) 650-3168 or jeff.grimm@wwu.edu.