Frustration May Escalate Substance Use Disorder and Abuse, Clinical Research Shows

There is little research today about the role frustration plays in substance use disorders despite the fact that previous studies have revealed that frustration tolerance in humans is associated with a lower likelihood of developing problems in substance use, good prognosis, and fewer relapses.

But a team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UMTB) has conducted a study focused on the role frustration plays in addiction.

The study is entitled "Lever-press duration as a measure of frustration in sucrose and drug reinforcement,' and was published in the medical journal Psychopharmacology.

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Frustration Is An Additional Factor that Causes Substance Use Disorders, Research Reveals

Relationship Between Frustration and Substance Use Disorder

Previous studies on drug addiction focused only on the three known factors that cause substance use problems. These are craving, impulsivity, and habit.

But the team from UMTB found a new way of studying frustration as the fourth factor in addiction, saying that it could also lead to an escalation of drug use and addiction.

They said that the role that frustration plays in substance use is sparse. However, several studies have revealed that people with substance use disorders have lower frustration tolerance and that those who have high sensitivity to frustration are more likely to relapse.

According to ANI News, the researchers studied a rat model to observe frustration-related behavior as these animals can be trained to react to a reinforcer by pulling a lever that will give them food.

On the other hand, frustration ensues when the rat cannot get food or receiving less of the reinforcer than it was expecting. The rat becomes frustrated when it learns that it has to work harder to receive the food.

In human behavior, this could be reflected when they could not get the channel on the television to change or when they have to wait too long for an elevator to arrive. In both rats and humans, frustration in these circumstances is a typical response.

The researchers observed that the rat started to press the lever more frequently and for longer periods if it did not get what it expected, like the sucrose pellet or an intravenous infusion of synthetic opioids.

"When a rat presses a lever repeatedly that was supposed to deliver a banana-flavored sucrose pellet, but the pellets never arrive, they hold the levers down longer as the frustration builds," said Dr. Thomas Green of the university's Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

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Study lead author and doctoral candidate Tileena Vasquez said that the rats would press the lever for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and about 10% of them would increase their fentanyl intake to double the average amount of the drug.

She noted that the rats would press the bar longer even sometimes for ten minutes although it does not increase the amount of drug delivered, Neuroscience News reported. Vasquez concluded that susceptible rats are frustrated in not getting enough drugs to satisfy them even though they are taking too much of what their bodies can handle.

According to Green, this has significant implications as a reference for future studies on opioid use disorder to help other scientists understand the correlation between frustration and the three other factors of craving, impulsivity, and habit that could lead to opioid addiction.