To the Editor: Substance abuse is a complex trait that is influenced by neurobiological, psychosocial, and environmental factors. While the ventral tegmental area/nucleus accumbens dopamine system is crucial to acute reward and the initiation of addiction, evidence suggests that permanent neuroplastic changes occur at the cellular and molecular levels that underlie the addictive process. The ti...

INTRODUCTION The hippocampus (HIP), the primary brain structure related to learning and memory, receives sparse but comprehensive dopamine innervations and contains dopamine D1/D2-like receptors. It is demonstrated that dopamine receptors in dentate gyrus (DG) region of HIP have a remarkable function in spatial reward processing. Much less is known about the involvement of HIP and its D1/D2 dop...

Morphine is used to sedate critically ill infants to treat painful or stressful conditions associated with intensive care. Whether neonatal morphine exposure affects microRNA (miR) expression and thereby alters mRNA regulation is unknown. We tested the hypothesis that repeated morphine treatment in stress-exposed neonatal mice alters hippocampal mRNA and miR expression. C57BL/6 male mice were t...

Opiates have complex effects on seizure thresholds as these substances have both anti and proconvulsive actions in the mammalian brain. A reduction of inhibitory synaptic activity or enhancement of excitatory synaptic activity would be expected to trigger a seizure. This study is designed to determine how morphine and naloxone affect seizures induced by a low Mg2+ perfusate in the whole, intact...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether wild ginseng (WG) administration could attenuate anxiety- and depression-like behaviors and expression of corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) and neuropeptide Y (NPY) following withdrawal from repeated morphine administration in rats. Male rats were administered daily doses of WG (50, 100, or 200 mg/kg, i.p.) for 5 days, 30 min before morphine...

In previous studies we reported that although morphine dose dependently inhibits noxious stimulus-evoked expression of the c-fos proto-oncogene in the rat spinal cord, morphine was without effect in certain populations of presumed nociresponsive neurons, even under conditions of complete behavioral analgesia. To determine whether the neurons that continue to express the c-fos gene include proje...

Previous studies demonstrated that drug cues could elicit drug-like or withdrawal-like effect, both subjectively and physiologically. However, few studies have compared the central activities induced by a drug-related environment and the drug itself. The aim of this study was to observe and compare electroencephalographic (EEG) changes induced by acute morphine administration and by the morphin...

Our understanding of the pathophysiology of the pathological pain and the pharmacology of analgesic treatments has progressed tremendously over the past two decades. Among the well-documented pro-algesic factors, glia and other toll-like receptors (TLRs)-expressing cells in the neuroimmune interface have been recognized for their role in the development of neuropathic pain and for compromising ...