research guide - UTEP Magazine - University of Texas at El Paso

Solving Addictive Behavior
Researchers study nicotine addiction among adolescents
It’s no secret that a large number of
adolescents smoke. A 2005 study by the
Centers for Disease Control reported that 23
percent of high school students admitted they
smoked cigarettes in the past month.
Laura E. O’Dell, Ph.D., an assistant
professor of psychology at UTEP, is working
to understand why adolescents seem more
vulnerable than adults to tobacco addiction.
The National Institutes of Health has
awarded O’Dell a five-year $1.5 million RO1
research grant to study the mechanisms
of nicotine reward and withdrawal during
adolescence.
Her team is trying to find out whether the
effects of nicotine or nicotine withdrawal are
age-or sex-dependent by studying the neural
mechanisms that mediate nicotine abuse.
“This is an addiction that we need to
understand not just from a sociological
perspective, but from a biological perspective,”
says O’Dell, who teaches a Drugs of Abuse
and Behavior course that focuses on the neural
basis of addiction.
Laura E. O'Dell, Ph.D.
“Our goal is to try to
understand from a behavioral
and neurochemical level what
happens when adolescents get
addicted to nicotine.”
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