This review is an attempt to highlight evidence that may implicate the endogenous opioid system in the pathogenesis of hypertension in humans. The evidence raised includes biochemical, physiological, pharmacological, and behavioral studies conducted in in vitro and in vivo systems, experimental models of hypertension, and humans with essential hypertension. While the compelling biochemical and ...

Background Drug overdose mortality, particularly involving opioid analgesics, has risen steadily over the past two decades and is now the leading cause of injury death in the United States. Benzodiazepines are commonly prescribed concurrently to individuals receiving opioid analgesics. Little is known about the association between benzodiazepine-prescribing patterns and overdose mortality in th...

Chronic exposure of mu-and delta-opioid receptors to their agonists leads to different rates in receptor down-regulation. In order to analyze the role of the carboxyl terminus of mu-and delta-opioid receptors in the difference in the rate of down-regulation, two chimeras of these receptors were generated by swapping the carboxyl termini; MORTAGDT and DORTAGMT. These chimeras were tagged at the ...

This review is an attempt to highlight evidence that may implicate the endogenous opioid system in the pathogenesis of hypertension in humans. The evidence raised includes biochemical, physiological, pharmacological, and behavioral studies conducted in in vitro and in vivo systems, experimental models of hypertension, and humans with essential hypertension. While the compelling biochemical and ...

Salvia divinorum is a natural occurring hallucinogen that is traditionally used by the Mazatec Indians of central Mexico. The diterpene salvinorin A was identified as an active component of S. divinorum over 20 years ago, but only recently has biochemical screening indicated that a molecular target of salvinorin A in vitro is the kappa-opioid receptor. We have examined whether salvinorin A, the...

In vivo administration of μ-opioid receptor selective agonists to various species is known to suppress lymphocyte, NK cell, and macrophage functions, in addition to mediate pain relief and euphoria. Using a mouse model in which the μ-opioid receptor gene was disrupted by targeted homologous recombination, we explored the involvement of this receptor in natural killer (NK) cell activity and T ly...

BACKGROUND Determinants of the duration of opioid use after surgery have not been reported. We hypothesized that both preoperative psychological distress and substance abuse would predict more prolonged opioid use after surgery. METHODS Between January 2007 and April 2009, a prospective, longitudinal inception cohort study enrolled 109 of 134 consecutively approached patients undergoing maste...

The analgesic effect of opioids varies widely among vertebrate species. This may be due to the distribution, number and type of opioid receptors within the brain. In general, distribution of opioid receptor types is conserved across species in brainstem and spinal cord areas but varies significantly in the forebrain [2]. In the pigeon forebrain 76% of the total opioid receptors are kappa [2]. E...

Opioids elicit antinociception in mammals through three distinct types of receptors designated as mu, kappa and delta. However, it is not clear what type of opioid receptor mediates antinociception in non-mammalian vertebrates. Radioligand binding techniques were employed to characterize the site(s) of opioid action in the amphibian, Rana pipiens. Naloxone is a general opioid antagonist that ha...