Smoking lights up brain’s response differently in men and women

Yale researchers using a new brain imaging analysis method have confirmed that smoking cigarettes activates a dopamine-driven pleasure and satisfaction response differently in men compared to women.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, used a new way of analyzing PET (positron emission tomography) scans to create “movies” of the dopamine response during smoking to demonstrate for the first time that smoking-induced dopamine activation occurs in a different brain region and much faster in nicotine-dependent men than women. Read more.