Club Drug May Exhaust Mood
Chemical in Brain
By Nicolle Charbonneau
HealthSCOUT Reporter
TUESDAY, July 25 (HealthSCOUT) -- The club drug
high of ecstasy may fool you into feelings of peace, love
and empathy, but it may also be depleting your brain's stores of a crucial
messenger chemical, says a new study.
In the latest issue of Neurology, researchers at Toronto's Centre for Addiction
and Mental Health describe how the brain of an overdose victim -- a nine-year
veteran of ecstasy abuse -- shows much lower levels of the neurotransmitter
serotonin. The findings are the first of this kind in humans, and researchers
believe it may link serotonin loss to some of the behavioral effects of ecstasy.
Ecstasy, also known as methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is a
synthetic, mind-altering drug that acts both like amphetamines and
hallucinogens. It's thought to cause the release of serotonin from nerve cells that
produce the neurotransmitter. The high, which lasts from several minutes to an
hour, produces increased energy along with a feeling of peacefulness and
empathy.
The 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse survey found that roughly
3.4 million Americans at least 12 years old had used ecstasy at least once during
their lifetime.
This study focused on a young man who began using ecstasy when he was 17,
gradually increasing his use from once a month to four or five times a week.
Generally, he would "binge" over the weekend, consuming six to eight tablets
over three days. After the binge, said friends, he would appear depressed and
slow down in speech, in movement and in reaction time.
In the last few months of his life, he added cocaine and heroin to his list of
habits, and died at the age of 26 of a drug overdose.
Lead author Stephen Kish and his colleagues examined the man's brain after
death, and compared the findings to autopsies of 11 healthy people. Kish, the
head of the Centre's Human Neurochemistry Pathology Laboratory, found that
levels of serotonin in the drug abuser's brain were 50 percent to 80 percent
lower than normal.
"We think that [the post-binge depression] is most likely due to the serotonin
deficiency," says Kish. "There's also evidence that the low serotonin might be
related to the cognitive deficits, the problems in thinking, in abstract reasoning,
in memory that can occur the day after drug-taking. Some of these effects appear
to be rather permanent in some individuals."
According to Dr. Una McCann, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., amphetamines are actually the only class
of drugs that lead to long-term changes in bodily chemicals. "The fact that this
person took cocaine and heroin would not explain the loss of serotonin," says
McCann.
"This is exactly what you'd expect based on the abundant work that's been done
on this drug in animals, including non-human primates," says McCann. She says
that it's possible for someone to naturally have lower levels of serotonin, but not
to this extent.
However, she adds that it's not clear whether the low serotonin levels are the
result of chronic ecstasy abuse or the acute overdose that caused the man's death.
Timothy Condon, the associate directory of the National Institute on Drug Abuse
in Bethesda, Md., says that depression is common after a binge of ecstasy, and
speculation has pointed to depletion of serotonin. "I don't know that we actually
have a cause and effect at this stage," says Conlon, "but it's pretty likely that
that's it."
These findings may point to possible therapies for treating withdrawal from
ecstasy, namely, drugs that replace lost serotonin or prevent ecstasy from
depleting the neurotransmitter. Still, Kish and the other experts say that since this
report is based on one person, more research is needed.
What To Do
Put simply, don't take ecstasy, says McCann. Ecstasy can cause side effects such
as involuntary teeth-clenching, nausea, blurred vision, faintness, and chills or
sweating. Increases in heart rate and blood pressure are a special risk for people
with circulatory or heart disease.
It can even kill -- by giving the user energy to dance for long periods in the hot,
crowded conditions usually found at the all-night dance parties called raves. This
can lead to dehydration, hyperthermia, and heart or kidney failure.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse provides specific facts about ecstasy, plus
information on other club drugs.
You can also go through this excellent slide show from DanceSafe.Org. |
