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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Hard to pinpoint a single cause of most mental health disorders and challenges. But they're often linked to too much or too little dopamine in different parts of the brain. Examples include:Schizophrenia. This severe but treatable psychiatric disorder causes hallucinations (seeing things that aren’t real) and delusions (firmly believing in untrue ideas). Other symptoms include disorganized thoughts and unusual body movements. A dopamine imbalance along different pathways in the brain causes these symptoms.ADHD. No one knows for sure what causes attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Some research shows it may be due to a shortage of dopamine. This problem may be due to your genes. The ADHD drug methylphenidate (Ritalin) works by boosting dopamine.Drug misuse and addiction. Drugs such as cocaine can cause a big, fast increase of dopamine in your brain. That satisfies your natural reward system in a big way. But repeated drug use also raises the threshold for this kind of pleasure. This means you need to take more to get the same high. Meanwhile, drugs make your body less able to produce dopamine naturally. This leads to emotional lows when you’re sober.It also plays a role in diseases that aren’t related to mental health. One of these is Parkinson’s disease. Another is obesity.Parkinson’s disease. Dopamine enables neurons, or nerve cells, in your brain to communicate and control movement. In Parkinson’s, basal ganglia, which are an important part of brain cells and nerves that control body movement, steadily break down. Without a signal to send anymore, your body makes less dopamine. These changes in your brain lead to a chemical imbalance that causes physical symptoms, including tremors, stiffness, slowed voluntary movement, poor balance, and poor coordination. Doctors treat these symptoms with medications that raise dopamine levels.Obesity.Most of the time, if you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. So why can’t people with obesity simply eat less and slim down? The answer isn’t that simple. If you have obesity, you may face obstacles that others don't, including problems with your natural reward systems. This can affect the amount of food you eat before you
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