Posted on 08/09/2015 3:16:06 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The major hurdle in treating addiction is enabling a person to not return to the abused drug or substance. This has proved extremely difficult for researchers and patients alike, as even with the best rehabilitation therapy and the most supportive friends and families, many addicts of psychostimulant drugs--methamphetamine, cocaine, and MDMA--relapse soon after therapy ends, often because the memory of the drug’s effect is too strong for that person to resist. But researchers are the University of Florida have come up with a way to in essence, “erase” the memory of the drug’s effect from the brain and thus help prevent that person from returning to the substance. The study was published this week in the journal, Molecular Psychiatry.
While the idea of erasing a memory may seem perilous, the researchers showed in mice that the drug only affects the memory associated with a psychostimulant’s addictive response. However, the drug is in its earliest stages: It has yet to be tested in humans and depending on future safety tests, may never actually make it to the market. If it does, it won’t be for at least another five years, The Washington Post reported.
The mechanism behind the drug utilizes properties involved in how memories form. Prior to this study, the researchers found in 2013 that the memories created after using a psychostimulant drug (in the experiment’s case, they gave methamphetamine to mice) were inherently different than those made from normal memories. “Normal memories” of say your first day of school or a vacation you went on are sitting in your brain as a connection of neurons which are supported by the protein, actin. The actin quickly stabilizes and the memory is secured in your brain. But in the case of a memory created using amphetamine, the actin never actually stabilizes. The researchers took advantage of this instability and created a drug that would disrupt the actin and thus, the memory. However, because actin is involved in more than just memories (it makes muscles works and helps the heart to contract), disrupting actin would be extremely dangerous.
In this new study, however, the researchers utilized another molecule, nonmuscle myosin IIB, that helps actin work, but is further up in the biological cascade, so it doesn’t affect how actin is involved with muscle or heart function. The drug they created, called Blebbistatin, or Blebb, disrupts nonmuscle myosin IIB interrupting the unstable actin and “erasing” the memory associated with the psychoactive drug. The medicine works on only that memory and disrupts it for at least 30 days, the authors write. They also say this can be done with just a single dose.
Before the treatment can be used or given the okay for human trials, the researchers have to test the medicine’s effect on other drugs and make sure it is safe for human use.
And lastly, as The Washington Post reports, “There is the hurdle of convincing people to erase--or at least suppress--parts of their memories.” However, the article also notes, these memories may be the exact ones that those affected by drug addiction are desperate to delete.
Being a meth addict also erases memories.
Which is great. The downside is that this is also very applicable to being used to ‘reeducate’ in less altruistic areas..
Did they have the mice keeping tiny diaries, or what?
and bank accounts.
How about memories of bad women?
Often erasing even the memories of other people.
Whom the meth heads murder because for some meth heads the paranoia methamphetamine causes becomes ingrained and they act upon it at any target they may happen to fixate on.
Why use it in the first place? Does it erase stupidity?
Is this why they are injecting brain cells from the babies murdered by PP into mice brains?
Just like PopSci’s many rosy predictions about flying cars, looks like this one isn’t quite ready for prime time either, as PopSci would have you believe. Here’s a few quotes PopSci left out of their rosy synopsis of the scientific publication they ripped off:
“In addition to NMIIs, Blebb inhibits skeletal, cardiac and some smooth muscle myosin IIs
Further, phototoxicity reported with Blebb upon exposure to blue light was recently overcome with a C15 nitro derivative of the compound.
However, several aspects of Blebb are still in need of improvement from a neurotherapeutic perspective, particularly its selectivity and solubility. In addition to being an inhibitor of all three NMII isoforms (A, B and C), Blebb targets skeletal, smooth and cardiac muscle myosin IIs, which are expressed in the adult human amygdala and throughout the body. Therefore, future medicinal chemistry efforts directed at improved isoform selectivity would provide biologists with much needed NMII probes and bene?t SUD neurotherapeutic discovery.”
Beat me to it, ‘modern research’ at work, huh?
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