AT MCLEAN, MRI SCANNER TO INVESTIGATE DRUG ADDICTION

Center To Target Brain Disorders

McLean Hospital yesterday became ground zero in the race to enlist
high-tech research on the brain in the war on drugs.

With two of the federal government's top anti-drug scientists on
hand, the Belmont hospital unveiled the first magnetic resonance
imaging scanner devoted to studying substance abuse and other
psychiatric problems.

The MRI, which uses high-powered magnets to take cross-sectional
images of the brain and other organs, may help explain why some
people have especially strong cravings for cocaine or heroin,
hopefully yielding new ways to treat those addictions.

And that's just the beginning. McLean researchers say their $5
million Brain Imaging Center will let psychiatrists develop the same
sorts of tests to identify depression and schizophrenia that
cardiologists have long relied on for heart disease and nephrologists
for kidney disorders.

''It's most unsettling that here we are in the next millennium and
we're still resorting to the same consensus checklist of symptoms to
define psychiatric disorders,'' said Dr. Perry Renshaw, director of
the Brain Imaging Center. ''Over time, we hope to develop
descriptions based on objective measures of brain activity of these
incredibly common, destructive, morbid disorders.''

Albert Brandenstein, chief scientist at the White House Drug Policy
Office, has equally high hopes for the center he helped inaugurate
yesterday: ''We're taking a step forward from pure research ... This
is the first time we're putting this kind of equipment into a
clinical setting,'' he said.

''We want to understand the reasons people crave drugs,'' he added.
''We want to know what happens to the human brain and to the
individual from the time they're in the ninth grade to the 12th,
which is a period when quite a bit of risky behavior turns up.''

To help answer questions like those, Brandenstein's office kicked in
$2.4 million for a $3.5 million whole-body MRI whose magnets are more
than 80,000 times more powerful than the Earth's magnetic field - one
of only about 25 scanners that powerful in the world. It offers
nearly a three-fold upgrade from conventional scanners in clarity of
picture and precision of chemical assessment.

That scanner, along with two others that cost $1.5 million, will be
used to track abnormalities in brain chemistry of people with
addictions and psychiatric disorders. They also will zero in on
medications and other treatments.

McLean already has had success in using such high-tech systems to
treat substance abuse, which is why the government was willing to
commit so much money to the new technologies. Researchers there have
shown that the heroin substitute methadone can bring the brain of
heroin users back into equilibrium; they have traced the way
marijuana can actually rewire users' brains; and they are searching
for therapies for cocaine dependence.

The new equipment will let researchers there do even more
path-breaking research, Renshaw said. He compared normal MRIs to his
Toyota Camry, a reliable but prosaic car. The new scanners, by
contrast, ''are like a high-speed racing car. Their capabilities are
much much greater, but they also require much greater control.''

The new system also will let researchers see brain changes that occur
over seconds rather than minutes, said Glen Hanson, head of
neuroscience and behavioral research at the National Institute on
Drug Abuse, which contributed $400,000 for the scanners. Among the
questions he hopes to see answered at McLean are why the frontal lobe
of the brain is altered in some users of the drug ecstasy, and how
that can be reversed.