A large body of evidence in both animal and human studies suggests that CB1R antagonism is highly effective for the treatment of obesity, metabolic disorders and drug addiction.
Currently, new research strategies are under development to target the endocannabinoid system for drug addiction avoiding these side effects, which include allosteric negative modulators of CB1 receptors and compounds targeting CB2 receptors.
The most abundant receptor of the eCB system in the central nervous system is the CB1 receptor (CB1R), which is predominantly expressed in areas involved in drug addiction, such as the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, the substantia nigra and the raphe nucleus.
However, many works have repeatedly associated polymorphisms in the CNR1 and FAAH genes with drug-related behaviours; this suggests that these genes should be examined in further genetic studies focusing on drug addiction and other psychiatric disorders.
The aim of the present work was to systematically review all association studies of cannabis receptor 1 (CNR1) polymorphisms with dependence syndrome and to perform a meta-analysis.
Since the cannabinoid system is part of the reward pathway we examined the hypothesis that genetic variants of the CNR1 gene might be associated with susceptibility to alcohol or drug dependence.
In our prior study we observed a significant association between homozygosity for the > or = alleles of a microsatellite polymorphism of cannabinoid receptor genes (CNR1) and drug dependence.