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Edythe D.
London, Ph.D. Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, at the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA |
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Contact Information UCLA Neuropsychiatric
Institute
Dr. London's research has advanced the study of substance abuse and the development of new approaches and probes for studies of brain function. She has edited several books and authored over 200 original research articles and over 60 reviews. Her most recognized accomplishments involve PET scanning of human subjects who suffer from addictions. Dr. London's group was the first to show a relationship between drug craving and activity of brain regions that link memory with emotion. She also showed that drug abusers have structural abnormalities in prefrontal cortex and deficits in decision-making tasks that depend on prefrontal cortex function. Her work influenced other researchers to look toward the frontal lobe for an understanding of the compulsive self-administration of drugs despite detrimental effects, which characterizes drug addiction. Most recently, she and her colleagues have developed new probes for external imaging of those receptors in the brain where nicotine binds to produce its behavioral actions.
Selected References Grant S, London ED, Newlin DB, Villemagne VL, Liu X, Contoreggi C, Phillips RL, Kimes AS, Margolin A. Activation of memory circuits during cue-elicited cocaine craving. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA. 1996; 93:12040-12045. Newlin DB, Wong CJ, Stapleton JM, London ED. Intravenous cocaine decreases cardiac vagal tone, vagal index (derived in Lorenz space), and heart period complexity (approximate entropy) in cocaine abusers. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2000; 23(5):560-568. London ED, Ernst M, Grant S, Bonson K, Weinstein A. Orbitofrontal cortex and human drug abuse: functional imaging. Cerebral Cortex. 2000; 10:334-342.
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