Abstract
Drug addiction involves potentially life-long behavioral abnormalities that are caused in susceptible persons by continued exposure to a drug of abuse. The strength of these behavioral changes suggests that long-term changes in gene expression, within particular regions of the brain, may contribute importantly to the addiction phenotype. There is now substantial evidence supporting the involvement of epigenetic mechanisms in gene expression alterations related to psychiatric disorders, including drug addiction. Drug abuse, as an environmental stimulus, can trigger epigenetic changes, which result in altered gene expression. These changes are heritable and target the epigenome, while the DNA sequence remains unaffected. This chapter includes the effect of abused drugs on DNA. As will be seen, there are strong data suggesting that sustained exposure to drugs of abuse induces changes within the brain's reward regions in two major modes of epigenetic regulation—histone modifications such as acetylation and methylation as well as DNA methylation.
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