Addictive Drugs
By introducing the "weak base hypothesis" of amphetamine action, means to measure amphetamine's effects on the quantal size of dopamine release, intracellular patch electrochemistry to measure dopamine levels in the cytosol, and providing real-time measurement of dopamine release by reverse transport, Sulzer's lab showed how amphetamine and methamphetamine release dopamine and other neurotransmitters and exert their synaptic and clinical effects.
The group extended these findings to show how methamphetamine neurotoxicity occurs, due to dopamine-derived oxidative stress in the cytosol followed by induction of autophagy, and with Nigel Bamford of the University of Washington, how these drugs activate long-term changes in the cortical synapses that project to the striatum: these changes, which they label "chronic postsynaptic depression" and "paradoxical presynaptic potentiation", the latter because methamphetamine selectively normalizes cortical synapses only of animal that previously were exposed to the drugs, appear to last for the life-time of the animal, and may underlie changes in the brain that lead to drug dependence and addiction.
Read more about this topic: David Sulzer
Famous quotes containing the words addictive and/or drugs:
“Love sorrows are addictive as other sorrows are not.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off.”
—C.E. (Charles Edward)