Instead of turning the patient's overactive dopamine receptor off, it dims it a bit.
In particular, work by Dr Fowler implicates another dopamine receptor, DRD2, and also 5HTT, which regulates serotonin levels, in influencing voter turnout.
In the late 1950s scientists linked schizophrenia to an overload of dopamine in the brain, so they devised the first generation of antipsychotics, which homed in on a single dopamine receptor.
But other sorts of dopamine receptor vary chemically in different parts of the brain so it might be possible to find a drug that blocks receptors only in those areas involved in relapse.
For example, a genetic database created by Spectra Biomedical, a division of Glaxo Wellcome, found an unexpected correlation between migraine attacks, serious depression and variations in the dopamine D2 receptor (a molecule that sticks out of certain nerve cells).
One of the main ways schizophrenia drugs differ is in how they inhibit a brain receptor for dopamine, a key neurotransmitter that is overactive in some parts of a schizophrenic's brain.
Its sufferers are often treated with haloperidol, which blocks the receptor molecules that dopamine stimulates, but this drug does not work well in everyone and can have unpleasant side-effects.
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Dopamine-producing nerve cells have acetylcholine-receptor molecules on their surfaces.
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DRD4 encodes a receptor molecule for a neurotransmitter called dopamine. (Neurotransmitters are chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another.) Those with a variant of DRD4 called 7R, and also a large network of friends acquired during their adolescence, tended to be (in the American sense of the word) liberals ie, left wing.
Neurosearch's compound stops cocaine from binding to the receptor by getting in the way and gradually brings dopamine levels back to normal.
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