Acetylcholine And Its Effects On The Human Body

Dopamine functions in your brain to help you deal with stress, anxiety, and relaxation, and should occur naturally, instead of being chemically induced. Dopamine can also raise levels of awareness and general pleasure, but the problem is that as dopamine levels increase from the use of cigarettes, natural chemical reactions in the body like dopamine decrease their natural production. After long term use of high-potency cigarettes (about 15 to 20 years), a person can permanently cripple the dopamine system, and ruin the ability to feel pleasure at all without first smoking a cigarette. When a smoker tries to quit, they experience days, weeks, and sometimes months of depression and anxiety, mainly because their dopamine production levels cannot recover quickly enough. …show more content…
They also cause the release of other neurotransmitters and hormones that affect your mood, appetite, memory, and more. Nicotine exerts its biological effects through nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. When nicotine gets into the brain, it attaches to acetylcholine receptors and mimics the actions of acetylcholine. Accumulating lines of evidence demonstrate that acetylcholine receptors play critical roles in mediating nicotine reward, dependence and addiction.
The actions of glutamate are regulated by ion tropic and metabotropic glutamate receptors. Nicotine's effects on glutamate cause the pleasurable effects of nicotine to last longer. Nicotine causes glutamate to speed up dopamine release. The result is a high level of dopamine that lasts more than an