Toward Quantum-Informed Addiction Medicine: Coherence, Entangled-Photon Imaging, and a Theranostic Hypothesis

Quantum biology has shown that selected biological processes depend on quantum effects, including coherence, tunnelling, and spin-dependent reactions. In parallel, quantum imaging now uses entangled photons to extract biological information at low photon flux. Early evidence that biological tissue can alter photon entanglement in disease-associated ways raises a translational question: whether decoherence itself can become a diagnostic signal.

Addiction is a disorder of reward-circuit function in which current imaging can define anatomy and network activity but cannot resolve molecular-scale information processing in affected tissue. This review asks whether emerging quantum-biological and entangled-photon approaches could, in the long term, provide a new way to interrogate addiction-relevant neural states.

This structured narrative review, informed by SANRA criteria and conducted across seven databases, synthesises evidence across five domains: quantum biology, entangled-photon imaging, decoherence-based tissue discrimination, addiction neuroscience, and quantum-theranostic concepts. Evidence supports quantum effects in selected living systems, with the strongest support for enzymatic tunnelling and more qualified evidence for radical-pair magnetoreception. The photosynthetic case, once the field's flagship, remains contested. Quantum imaging has demonstrated low-light biological imaging and proof-of-concept disease discrimination in ex vivo tissue through entanglement-decoherence signatures. No evidence currently demonstrates a decoherence signature of addiction or supports clinical quantum theranostics.

This review proposes a falsifiable translational hypothesis that remains to be established empirically: disease-associated decoherence signatures may represent a biological information channel, with reward-circuitry disorders such as addiction providing a clinically meaningful future test case. A staged research programme is outlined, progressing from ex vivo replication to living neural preparations, physical feasibility testing, addiction-relevant models, and only then to therapeutic perturbation.