How Exercise Affects Addiction Recovery: Q&A with Neuroscientist

A University at Buffalo neuroscientist who focuses on the brain’s reward system and its role in addiction is helping to shed light on how exercise can help the brain recover from addiction. Over the past year, this research has revealed that because exercise targets the same brain regions as addiction, it has the potential to be an important treatment tool for people with substance use disorders.

Panayotis (Peter) K. Thanos, Ph.D., a senior research scientist in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, is a lead or senior author of publications describing his work, which ranges from examining sexual differences in addiction and exercise in Clinics and Practice on how exercise can tackle alcohol abuse in Psychological research and behavioral management.

Thanos, who is also director of the Behavioral Neuropharmacology and Neuroimaging Laboratory at New York University’s Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions, discusses the potential of exercise as a treatment for substance use disorders.

How did you get interested in studying the relationship between exercise and addictive behavior? What was the first thing that made you think, ‘Okay, there’s definitely something here that needs to be studied?’

About 15 years ago I discovered that there were several recovery programs in New York City and Philadelphia that showed that people were better able to stay sober and that the risk of relapse was reduced.

This led me to investigate the mechanism of this clinical observation using animal models. The initial results of this study were very supportive of the potential of exercise in curbing drug preference as a powerful adjunctive tool to promote recovery and reduce the risk of relapse.

What are the challenges in understanding the connections between exercise and the brain?

The effects of exercise need to be better characterized and understood. For example, we do not yet understand the complexity of exercise and the individual differences in response to different types of exercise regimens. We also do not fully understand the concept of exercise dose. How much exercise is needed to have the desired effect? ​​Not all exercise is equal and does not have the same effects on all people in terms of brain signaling and behavior.

What are you currently working on and participating in clinical trials?

Yes, in collaboration with Western University of Health Sciences we are involved in clinical research to assess exercise dose and risk of relapse. We hope to have some pilot data by next spring that we can use to apply for funding. In preclinical research we are looking at how exercise affects endocannabinoid brain signaling and functional connectivity of the brain.

What does this research say about how effective exercise can be in treating addictive behaviors and, potentially, improving mental health more generally? What do you want people, policymakers, and funders to know about the potential of exercise as a treatment?

More research is needed to understand the dosage and regimens of exercise. We cannot generalize and say that all exercise is the same to properly assess its impact in medicine.

We also need to better understand how exercise is influenced by our individual genomic differences, similar to what we know about pharmacogenomics.