HeroinTimes
	| content | editorial | letters | news | viewpoint | medical | articles | law | flashback |  | stories | street | detox | people | obituary | w-watch | i-vention | pharmacy | pro-shop |  | hep-c | women | spiritual | treatment | exchange | reviews | memo-park | archives | about-us |

Study Shows How Methamphetamine Affects Brain Two new imaging studies help explain how methamphetamine affects the human brain, according to a Dec. 1 press release from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Previous studies have shown that methamphetamine damages the nerve endings of human brain cells in the striatum, which contains dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a role in memory, mood, and motor coordination. Two new studies provide additional insight about the actions of the drug. In the first study, Drs. Nora Volkow and Linda Chang and colleagues at the Brookhaven National Laboratory used positron emission tomography (PET) scans and other technologies to measure Can Medication Successfully Treat Substance Addiction? Robert M. Swift, M.D. The Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, Brown University and the VA Medical Center in Providence, Rhode Island Opioid Dependence The most widely used pharmacological treatments for opioid-dependent individuals include pharmacological maintenance treatments with the opiate agonists methadone and l-alpha-acetylmethodol (LAAM), maintenance with the partial opiate agonist buprenorphine, and opiate antagonist therapy with naltrexone. Methadone is ... the level of dopamine D2 receptors and to assess the rate of glucose metabolism, a sensitive measure of brain-cell activity, in the brains of 15 methamphetamine users and 20 non-drug users. The researchers found that methamphetamine acts on the same part of the brain's orbitofrontal cortex affected by cocaine and alcohol. The study is published in the December issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. In the second study, the same team of researchers determined that brain cells damaged by methamphetamine might recover after prolonged abstinence from the drug. The study is published in the Dec. 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. |||

M E D I C A L

	January 2002