Opioid dependence found to permanently change brains of rats:
Approximately one-quarter of patients who are prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them, with five to 10 percent developing an opioid use disorder or addiction. In a new study, published Jan. 14, 2020 in PNAS, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found that opioid dependence produced permanent changes in the brains of rats.
More specifically, researchers reported that dependence on oxycodone, a potent opioid painkiller, led to permanent neuro-adaptations of the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) at the level of the nociceptin system, a brainwide network that modulates transmission of pain. Downregulation or suppression of the nociceptin system in the CeA led to an increase in activation of GABA receptors in rats highly addicted to opioids. The discovery is consistent with previous findings reporting CeA neuroa-daptations after cocaine and alcohol dependence.
When researchers restored nociceptin levels in the CeA, it resulted in normalization of GABAergic transmission and a reduction of the rats' opioid consumption.
"This suggests the nociceptin system may be a promising target for the treatment of opioid use disorder," said senior author Giordano de Guglielmo, PharmD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
"To reveal the role of nociceptin in the central nucleus of the amygdala, we used a multidisciplinary approach with behavioral models, molecular biology and electrophysiology," said first author Marsida Kallupi, PharmD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry. "That allowed us to conclude that downregulation of this peptide may be partially responsible for excessive opioid addiction-like behaviors."
Marsida Kallupi, Lieselot L. G. Carrette, Jenni Kononoff, Leah C. Solberg Woods, Abraham A. Palmer, Paul Schweitzer, Olivier George, Giordano de Guglielmo. Nociceptin attenuates the escalation of oxycodone self-administration by normalizing CeA–GABA transmission in highly addicted rats. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201915143 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1915143117
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @05:23AM (14 children)
These sort of headlines are annoying. I think most would agree that the vast majority of our consciousness comes from our brain, perhaps with supplementary interactions of things like our gut biome. As an example when you get cut it doesn't hurt because it actually hurts - pain does not exist outside of your mind. It hurts because your brain creates a sensation, that we've labeled as pain, in your body at that location. Pain's an awesome evolutionary mechanic for self preservation. And similarly I'm sure we'd all agree that most of any significant experience shapes us in ways we can't really reverse. Yet these two very simple observations have a surprisingly profound implication:
Every significant experience changes your brain, permanently. You reading this post has changed your brain permanently. We may lack the ability to precisely measure it, but it has. Any emotions you feel or not, any recollection you have of this post - all of this is driven by your brain in ways that will persist long after you've read this post. When you read another headline of [x] changes the brain your perception will be influenced, in part, by the part of your brain that has retained the criticism espoused in this post.
This same criticism goes for headlines of the sort brains of [people of some sort of group identity] different than those [with different group identity]. The people who's favorite sport is MMA will obviously have different brains those whose favorite sport is synchronized swimming. And since we all share quite a lot of the same wiring, it's likely that individuals who prefer MMA will have shared similarities that are mutually exclusive to those whose favorite sport is synchronized swimming, and vice versa. So for instance men who are sexually attracted to men will have different brains than those who are sexually attracted to women. This doesn't even imply a genetic source of homosexuality, unless you could observe such difference in newborns. All the brains being different tells you is that the people are different.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Booga1 on Friday January 31 2020, @06:10AM (13 children)
The headline may be annoying, but the studies are important.
What this particular finding is about is how certain substances cause adaptations in the brain in repeatable and predictable ways that have long term impacts on brain chemistry. Unfortunately, that gets boiled down to a nice digestible headline that isn't wrong but still reads like clickbait.
The more we study addiction and the effects on the brain, the better we understand how to treat it. Treating addiction as a disease becomes more useful as it becomes clear that extended periods of substance abuse isn't just a willpower issue, it's an actual chemical imbalance that isn't always reversed when the substance abuse stops. We need to know why some people get DUI after DUI even after they've been tossed in jail and sobered up. Same for the heroin junkie that comes out of prison clean and drug free yet still falls back into the same habits that landed them in prison. It's abundantly clear that jail time alone is not enough to solve severe cases of addiction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @06:35AM (3 children)
No, this is just more pointless torture of animals for career reasons. Rat brains are NOTHING like human brains, you can knock out like 20% of the brain and they will behave near normal a couple days later. Ie, you need to watch them very closely to notice anything abnormal. At the very least this needs to be done in guinea pigs.
And I'm sure if I look at the paper I will find all the standard BS too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @06:53AM
Brain Injury in guinea pigs is studied here: "Stroking guinea pigs helps people recover from catastrophic brain injuries"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6902707/Stroking-GUINEA-PIGS-helps-people-recover-catastrophic-brain-injuries.html [dailymail.co.uk]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @08:21AM (1 child)
And if I don't look at the paper, I will find the same standard BS.
Amazing. Almost like the logic of the Malleus Maleficarum [wikipedia.org], the Hammer of the Witches, of the witch-hunting craze of the Fifteenth Century. Much like now, if Trump denies he is a impeachable president, well that just is more evidence that he is! On the contrary, should he confess to High Crimes and Misdemeaors, and consorting with demons and Rudi Guliani, well, the gig is up.
So I am going to look in your paper, and your review of the said paper, and if I do not find any, at all, of the standard Bullshit, I am coming for you, AC. Defamation of scientist like this is not without consequences. We will find out where you live, what you do, and why you are such a douche. After that, we may take action, like, stealing all your underwear, or worse, only your left socks! We may sleep with your girlfriend, so you are never sure whether the child is yours. We may fake author scientific papers in your name, papers that will be candidates for the Ignobel Prize. You have no idea who you are messing with, so be more careful with your "BS" accusations. We may accidentally perform a rectal lobotomy on you, and blame Obamacare. You would buy that, wouldn't you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @08:44AM
Ok, show me where they were blinded to the treatment. Also what made them decide to split the analysis into low addiction vs high addiction subsets, was this decided before or after starting the study? Also figure out what the sample sizes were for each result, I see it for some but not others. Where is the scatter plot of the relationship between addictivity vs gabaergic transmission they claim exists (vs just arbitrarily comparing groups)?
Then it's typical BS of misinterpreting statistical significance. Let's come up with alternate explanations for a significant difference. The "highly addicted" animals were in more pain after the catheter installation surgery and was maybe even hypersensitive to noise like the tone they played. Ie, the primary outcome measure had nothing to do with addiction at all, or was measuring some combinations of these things.
Took 5 min to see this stuff. How is it so easy? It is the typical waste of time and money animal torture that is 100% standard and institutionalized these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @06:37AM (2 children)
And as to why people keep getting DUI's its because they like drinking and live too far from the bar to walk but too close to civilization to avoid notice.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 31 2020, @05:23PM (1 child)
Some of those people manage to Darwin Award themselves. But too often take others with them in the process.
Young people won't believe you if you say you're older than Google. (born before 1998-09-03)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @10:53PM
I assume everyone is drunk when driving at all times. And with the rise of cell phones 50% of people may as well be.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @01:14PM (1 child)
Is anyone aware of research into whether people with seemingly high willpower are actually altering their own brain? Is "willpower" just a specific brain chemistry, an inherited trait or learned behavior? Are people who have the "willpower" to cold-turkey addictive substance just less effected by the substance or do they have the same brain alterations? Real questions if anyone that has information in this area has any information, but I feel the "willpower" argument is usually just people arguing past each other because they apply their own meaning to the phrase.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday January 31 2020, @01:46PM
Before you can even tackle those questions you need an operational definition of "willpower".
Actually, that applies to this study, too, but they do define the things they are looking at. Expecting them to define the terms used by other people without operational definitions is unreasonable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @03:00PM (2 children)
Not at all! This is the whole point. Just because you've observed changes in the brain does not mean you know anything particularly insightful.
Right now our knowledge of the brain, a causal systematic understanding is 0. We currently analyze the brain similar to a person who had no ability to interact with a computer might analyze said computer. They could use a voltmeter, thermometer and other tools to see which areas were active during various scenarios. They could create a lot of correlations, some of them reasonably replicable. Yet I'm sure you'd agree that they'd stand effectively 0 chance of 'cracking' the BIOS with such crude tools, let alone meaningfully debugging malfunctioning programs. And any 'debugging' they did do would be the equivalent of crude solders which seem to have some effect on the target area yet with a practically 0 knowledge of what else they were effecting beyond what was readily apparent. 'Well the computer's still on, so we couldn't have done anything too bad.'
The real risk here is one of false knowledge. Our toolset is expanding quite rapidly beyond just a voltmeter or thermometer, yet we remain what is likely many centuries before we will have any genuine understanding of what we're dealing with. In the past ~4 decades mental illness rates along various psychological disorders have absolutely skyrocketed. Isn't it rather amusing that that it's the exact same time frame upon which a whole new hoard of new drugs and treatments of all sorts have been inflicted upon the population? Of course there's a causality question here. Are all the new drugs emerging because people are losing their shit? Or are people losing their shit because of all the new drugs?
We're so quick to forget that not long ago the state of the art in medicine was drilling holes into people's heads for disorders. This was happening all the way up til the 1960s at all levels of society. One of the most famous lobotomy recipients was Rosemary Kennedy - JFK's sister. Seizures and mood swings? Drill a hole in her head, at age 23. Left her incapacitated and unable to speak for the rest of her 86 year long life. We're a pretty damn stupid species when it comes to treating our illnesses. The arrogance to lead us to believe that such arrogance is now only a thing of the past is the exact same arrogance that led people to trust in drilling holes in their heads.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday January 31 2020, @10:27PM (1 child)
Many of these things are certainly true. We may still be at the "black box" testing level for the brain, but clearly some chemicals are the equivalent of "flipping a switch." For example, hormones are generally better understood, but we're still finding long term side effects from some of them.
We have a long way to go to understand why some anti-depressants relieve symptoms for some people and worsen it for others with what appear to be identical symptoms. I don't think that means we should all just give up and say "it is forever unknowable." It is called the practice of medicine for a reason. Primitive as it may seem in some fashion, we have to start somewhere. Along the way to reaching understanding of practically anything so complex as the brain it is just as important to have the negative results from tests. It is still progress when we find out what doesn't work.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:51PM
In general I do not disagree. You don't learn aerodynamics from zero without trying to mimic a bird, and probably catastrophically failing. The one major point I would emphasize is that it's not the negative results that concern me, it's the positive ones. When trying to fly, there's no real risk of side affects. If you can get enough lift to get off the ground, and you can safely land it - then you now have a workable flying device. When you're talking about the brain things are much more difficult because a failure can look like a success - a repeatable 'success', no less.
As of 2013 [cbsnews.com] about 1 in 6 Americans takes at least one psychiatric drug over the course of a year - 80% of them report longterm usage. That number is up from very near 0 not that long ago. If these drugs have even the slightest of positive effects, we should be seeing an ultra-positive overall effect on the nation in terms of mental health. Yet we seem to be seeing the exact opposite. When you look at things racially the numbers are even more insane. For instance more than 1 in 5 whites in America is on psychiatric drugs. And those numbers have been increasing extremely rapidly.
If it turns out our positive results are myopic, as history shows time and again that they tend to be, then we're metaphorically drilling a hole into the heads of a huge chunk of the entire nation's population.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:04AM
See Dr. Carl Hart. These studies are useless piles of rubish that do only one thing, perpetuate the problem through a fundamental lack of understanding. They tried using heroin as a substitute for morphine; it didn't work. They tried creating dextromethorphan and SSRI's to sidestep the addictive nature of sedatives and opiates; didn't work (SSRI's among other bad side affects can lead to suicide or mass shootings, and dextromethorphan is it's own interesting drug).
If you want to reduce or eliminate the danger inherent to opiate use, set up safe injection sites, legalize nalaxone, and train people how to use it. Also, make clean needles available and clean needle disposal available to prevent infection and communicable diseases. Doing those things drastically, and if done correctly, eliminates, over-dose related deaths and blood-borne disease transmission. These are the very reasons we consider these drugs to be so dangerous; but, we refuse to do these things because, we can't let them get high. Well, guess the fuck what, most of people that feel that way are going to have a beer after work, or some wine, or do some weekend social drinking, and just don't happen to socially approve of other forms of relaxation through intoxication.
It is that simple. The drug is a problem because of the inherent dangers involved in using it; so, let's start eliminating the dangers. It's like literally writing legislation that prevents cars from having seatbelts and airbags because the people in the cars owned them and drove them in the first place.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @07:13AM
So, if they had not used Runaway1956 as their sole test subject, the results might have had greater impact. As it is, the Fox New induced dementia, and the Trump Deplorable Syndrome, both affecting this test subject, make the results highly suspect. So much more, that I need more oxycontin from my doctor to test it out. For science. Seriously! Do I look like some loser hippy drug user? Hell no, I am, like Runaway, an
abuser of Opiodsmember of the VFW! I only take opium, or Morphine, or Heroin, when I need it, to manage my pain at having been used in wars that only served the interests of corporate American, and left my buddies face down in the rice paddies of the 'Nam. Without any Oxycontodin. Of course, the Coward Runaway (what a telling selection of a handle, no?), who never faced actual combat, could not possibly comprehend any of this. Fuck off, Runaway, you Russian shill and claimer of Stolen Valor!(citation: repeated requests to the United States Navy have produced no service record of a "Runaway1956", or any other "Runaway". We are left with the only possible conclusion, Runaway never served in the Navy, probably does not live in Arkansas, and has a very tiny penis that is only intermittenly functional. Mrs. Runaway has our sympathy, and Bob Doles' email.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @12:49PM (1 child)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899399 [nih.gov]
Article from 2011, which is nine years ago.
What I observe is misrepresenting what is in essence a replication as some kind of new science. Which in the vernacular is called lying.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday January 31 2020, @01:48PM
Perhaps, but replication is important, and if you don't represent it as new you won't get published.
Your criticism is valid, but should be directed at the system rather than at the article or the researchers.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @01:19PM
The better ones were able to avoid problems with fortitude.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Friday January 31 2020, @01:42PM (1 child)
I'm just gonna put this peer-reviewed article from the Journal of the American Medical Association here without comment. You all can draw your own conclusions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2685627 [jamanetwork.com]
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @02:10PM
I can just imagine the wheels turning, creakily, in your head as you read this thing that proves you, lil il papa, was so right all along. Pathetic.