Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director
Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine
I, Hussain Muhammad Abdullah, Chief Resident Psychiatry at Westchester Medical Center, New York Medical College, fellow bound Addiction Medicine at Stanford University class of 2021-2022, completed medical education from Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan.
Nature and biological underpinnings of addiction has always intrigued my inquisitive mind. Whether it is a baseline pathological tendency or it is induced secondary to addictive substances exposure?
Modern era neuroscience and medicine, with its strong foundations on psychological models of human behavior and support from advances in neuroscience and technology, is indebted with an answer to challenging field of drug addiction, which has troubled the mankind since ages.
During resiency, evaluating and treating a substantial percentage of patients with comorbid addiction and its impact on their physical and mental health and treatment compliance further strengthened my interest in Addiction. This provided me with an opportunity to try learn and understand basic tools used to study neurochemical mechanisms of addiction and their behavioral manifestation.
Addiction as a behavior is potentially driven by desire and intent at its core. Thoughts, once intense enough, can find connections with emotions and get transformed into desires, which can ultimately propel actions. Cortical and mid-brain driven neural processes, such as incentive salience, and many others constituting addictive behavior, can be defined through establishing neurochemical and neurobiological correlates. Functional connectivity studies can be utilized to estimate cross-talk between various regions of interest in the brain. Non-invasive electric and magnetic interventions can potentially modulate this communication through their impact on neuronal synaptic activity. This knowledge can further clarify addiction as a neural process with opportunities to find potential treatment targets. Conversely, less attention has been given to impact of drug use on local neuron environment, oxidative stress and immune dysregulation, which is crucial to sustain functional integrity of the nervous system.
My areas of interest include cannabis use disorder treatment; study of neurochemical correlates of craving in drug addiction with hope to identify potential pharmacological targets; impact of stimulant abuse on neuron microenvironment studied through markers of inflammation and subsequent central nervous system immune alterations; immune modulatory role of second generation antipsychotics in substance use disorders; and utility of non-invasive brain stimulation modalities in modulation of cognitive processes in drug addiction.
Albeit, addiction is a complex neural process but the hope is in building on what we know today by incorporating both scientific and psychological approaches to be better able to understand and treat it.
Opportunities for research led me to pursue training in the United States. I envision learning and personal development through ASAM platform, share and develop ideas to better understand addiction as a neurochemical process and search potential targets of treatment.
