Latest Cocaine Stories
NIDA-funded research in mice shows that nicotine primes the brain to enhance cocaine's effects A landmark study in mice identifies a biological mechanism that could help explain how tobacco products could act as gateway drugs, increasing a person's future likelihood of abusing cocaine and perhaps other drugs as well, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study is the first to show that nicotine might prime the brain to...
Parents of young caffeine consumers take heed: that high-calorie energy drink or soda might present more than just obesity risk. In fact, according to a double-blind, placebo-controlled study that examined responses to stimulants, an individual’s subjective response to caffeine may predict how he or she will respond to other stimulant drugs, possibly reflecting differences in risk for abuse of other more serious drugs of abuse, such as amphetamine and cocaine. The new findings are...
Cocaine users diagnosed with glaucoma two decades earlier than nonusers A study of the 5.3 million men and women seen in Department of Veterans Affairs outpatient clinics in a one-year period found that use of cocaine is predictive of open-angle glaucoma, the most common type of glaucoma. The study revealed that after adjustments for race and age, current and former cocaine users had a 45 percent increased risk of glaucoma. Men with open-angle glaucoma also had significant exposures to...
Narconon counselors help handle the reports on treatment admissions that show women suffer from higher rates of prescription drug and methamphetamine addiction while youth fall prey to marijuana, tranquilizer, and inhalant addiction. Houston, Texas (PRWEB) September 19, 2011 Recent Houston Chronicle reports have revealed that the city has become a “national hub for overdose deaths and pill mills.†Women and adolescents in the city struggle with their own particular brands of...
"Our data indicate that the brain becomes hypersensitive to rewards when this co-signaling of glutamate and dopamine does not function. Lower doses than normal are enough to increase the propensity to ingest the substance, and this is true of both sugar and cocaine," says Åsa Mackenzie, associate professor of neuroscience at Uppsala University and the researcher who led the study. Addiction disorders are a major social problem, and we lack sufficient knowledge of how they arise and how...
It is well established that a mood disorder can increase an individual's risk for substance abuse, but there is also evidence that the converse is true; substance abuse can increase a person's vulnerability to stress-related illnesses. Now, a new study finds that repeated cocaine use increases the severity of depressive-like responses in a mouse model of depression and identifies a mechanism that underlies this cocaine-induced vulnerability. The research, published by Cell Press in the August...
When a research team asked cocaine addicts to choose, hypothetically, between money now or cocaine of greater value later, "preference was almost exclusively for the money now," said Warren K., Bickel, professor in the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, director of the Advanced Recovery Research Center, and professor of psychology in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. This result is significantly different from previous studies where a subject chooses between some...
Researchers studying mice are getting closer to understanding how stress affects mood and motivation for drugs.According to the researchers, blocking the stress cascade in brain cells may help reduce the effects of stress, which can include anxiety, depression and the pursuit of addictive drugs.A research team from St. Louis and Seattle reports in the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Neuron that in mice exposed to stress, a protein called p38α mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) influences...
While some pain killers need to be injected into the damaged tissue in order to work, topical anaesthetics only need to be spread on the surface. The earliest examples of "topical" anaesthetics contained cocaine, but now a new systematic review has shown that newer agents that don't contain cocaine can effectively treat pain caused by torn skin. This makes these pain killers an attractive choice for doctors who need to sew-up a patient's skin wound.This finding was reached after a...
People who abused methamphetamine or other amphetamine-like stimulants were more likely to develop Parkinson's disease than those who did not, in a new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).The researchers examined almost 300,000 hospital records from California covering 16 years. Patients admitted to hospital for methamphetamine or amphetamine-use disorders had a 76 per cent higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease compared to those with no disorder.Globally,...
