‘Health’

The skin also suffers the effects of cocaine

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

the effects of cocaine

Skin ulcers, itching, blisters, hives, rashes, warts on the nasal mucosa. These skin changes may be triggered because of the consumption of cocaine addiction. If a patient has chronic skin lesions and shows a strange and delusional behavior, should be an overall drug tests to confirm whether the use of this drug is the cause, as recommended by an article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

“However, they must also be completely excluded other triggers of these skin reactions, even when they are illegal substances during testing, since a positive drug test does not always indicate the source of injuries,” warn the authors of the paper, conducted in the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota (USA). (more…)

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Cocaine change the way genes function in the brain

Friday, January 15th, 2010

function in the brain

Prolonged exposure to cocaine can cause permanent changes in how genes are turned on and off in the brain, a finding that may lead more effective treatments for many types of addictions, researchers estadoundienses.

A study in mice conducted by the team of Ian Maze, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, found that chronic cocaine addiction prevented a specific enzyme performs his work of suppression of some genes in the brain circuits for pleasure.

This effect made even more longed rodents drugs.

The research helps explain how cocaine use changes the brain, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the study published in the journal Science.

“This discovery is enabling a new understanding of how the repeated use of drugs in the long term modifies the function of neurons,” Volkow said in a telephone interview. (more…)

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The concept of addiction

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

The concept of addiction One might think that the concept of addiction is as old as time. Not so: the idea is relatively recent – and those who have defended always were driven by political or moral. The modern version of the concept was invented in the eighteenth by the physician Benjamin Rush, with his friends in the anti-alcohol, he had the addiction as the cause of (and argument against) the dangers of demon alcohol. Alcoholic beverages were then accused of causing a “disease control”.

Later, the theory of “degeneration” would make its way into the medical field, it was thought that mental disorders could be hereditary; this heredity condemning its victims to the mental and social failure. In the nineteenth in the Colonies, alcohol was rampant among the natives, deemed “inferior” the psychiatrists concluded that the two states – Alcoholism and degeneration – went together. The addiction as such was less attributable to the harmfulness of drugs, it is then attributed to the physiological weakness of the victims. He was complaining addicts, not condemn them.

The “degeneration” and eugenics eventually disappear in the 1950s – a death-deserved and well overdue. One idea, however, survived these concepts: the claim that addiction is caused by vulnerability to be a susceptibility which existed even before the person came into contact with drugs. This line of thought seems to have peaked in 2004: a report from the World Health said while substance dependence was “a mental disorder, as well as the neurological or psychiatric illness.

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