An effective anti-cocaine drug
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
All iLive content is medically reviewed or fact checked to ensure as much factual accuracy as possible.
We have strict sourcing guidelines and only link to reputable media sites, academic research institutions and, whenever possible, medically peer reviewed studies. Note that the numbers in parentheses ([1], [2], etc.) are clickable links to these studies.
If you feel that any of our content is inaccurate, out-of-date, or otherwise questionable, please select it and press Ctrl + Enter.
The combination of two existing drugs can be an effective treatment for cocaine addiction. As a result of such therapy, the craving for drugs decreases and symptoms of "withdrawal" decrease. These are the findings of a study by scientists from the Scripps Research Institute in California, USA, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Over the past decades, the treatment of addicts have changed. Now scientists are increasingly understanding what changes occur in the brain under the influence of drugs. Modern drugs for the treatment of drug addiction should minimize these long-term effects. Until now, scientists have repeatedly tried to create a drug for the treatment of cocaine addiction, but the drugs were ineffective for people. According to the researcher, Professor George Koob (George Koob), in this case, the combination of the two drugs can be a fundamentally new way of effective therapy. The combination suggested by the researchers includes naltrexone and buprenorphine. This choice is due to the mechanism of cocaine.
Getting into the blood, cocaine is transferred to the brain, where it accumulates in the areas responsible for a sense of pleasure. Here, cocaine molecules bind to dopamine transports and block its re-uptake. As a result, dopamine accumulates, which causes a person a sense of euphoria. In response, the brain enhances the formation of the dinorphine neuropeptide, which normalizes the amount of dopamine and reduces euphoria. Each cocaine intake increasingly disrupts this regulation mechanism, and each time it becomes more difficult to achieve a sense of euphoria, so the dose of the drug begins to increase. If the drug stops getting into the body, a strong "breaking" begins due to excessive activation of the system, overwhelming the feeling of pleasure.
Naltrexone is an approved FDA drug for the treatment of alcoholism and nicotine addiction. Buprenorphine is an opioid analgesic similar in its action to morphine and heroin. It is used to treat heroin dependence, because it normalizes the secretion of dopamine and dinorphine, but its use often leads to dependence. However, the combination of buprenorphine with small doses of naltrexone does not lead to the formation of opioid dependence.
In the course of experiments on rats, a combination of drugs showed promising results. The next step is clinical trials involving people. If efficacy in humans is confirmed, the method will be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the first officially approved treatment for cocaine dependence. This problem is extremely widespread in the US. According to data for 2008, 1.9 million Americans regularly take cocaine. About a quarter of all emergency hospitalizations in hospitals in America are associated with an overdose of cocaine.
[