Brain implants to be tested to help alcohol and opioid addicts

Trial to see if electrical pulses can control and decrease cravings

- Robin McKie

Surgeons are to put implants into the brains of alcoholics and opioid addicts in a trial aimed at testing the use of electrical impulses to combat drink and drug cravings.

The technique is already used to help patients control some of the effects of Parkinson's disease, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Now a group of doctors and researchers from Cambridge and Oxford universities and King's College London - are preparing to use deep brain stimulation to try to decrease addicts' yearnings and to boost their self-control.

"Deep brain stimulation acts like a pacemaker," the project's chief investigator Prof Valerie Voon, of Cambridge University's psychiatry department, told the Observer.

"Just as we can use a pacemaker to stabilise abnormal electrical rhythms in a person's heart, we believe we can use a brain implant to act like a pacemaker and normalise deviant electrical brain rhythms that are linked to addiction. This trial will show if this is a practical idea."