Objectives: Opioid addiction is associated with long-term adaptive changes in the brain that involve glial activation. Agmatine is an amine formed by the decarboxylation of l-arginine by the enzyme arginine decarboxylase. It binds to α2-adrenergic and imidazoline receptors, and selectively blocks N-methyl-Daspartate receptors. Agmatine treatment was reported to have various biological actions. ...

Drug addiction is increasingly viewed as the expression of abnormal associative learning following repeated exposures to the drugs of abuse. Previous studies have demonstrated that the patterns of repetition such as frequency and spacing are important to many kinds of learning and memory retention. We hypothesized that drug repetition pattern might affect the reward-related learning although th...

A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the human mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1 A118G) has been widely studied for its association in a variety of drug addiction and pain sensitivity phenotypes; however, the extent of these adaptations and the mechanisms underlying these associations remain elusive. To clarify the functional mechanisms linking the OPRM1 A118G SNP to addiction and analgesia p...

It has recently emerged that there is a commonality in the molecular mechanisms underlying long-term neuronal changes in drug addiction and those mediating synaptic plasticity associated with learning and memory. In the hippocampus, the calcium-calmodulin-dependent protein phosphatase calcineurin plays a pivotal role in the molecular mechanisms that underlie learning and memory functions. Trans...

Tolerance is an important component of opiate addiction, but the molecular basis for this phenomenon remains obscure. Here, we report that mice lacking neurotrophin-4 (NT4) display substantially reduced tolerance to morphine compared to wild-type. However, there were no deficits in sensitization and withdrawal, other behaviors relevant to drug addiction. Since NT4 knockout mice also show abnorm...

Background: Evidences show that parental morphine addiction impairs CNS development, learning and memory in offsprings. Since long term potentiation (LTP) is a cellular mechanism of learning and memory, in this study the effect of parental morphine addiction on LTP induction in dentate gyrus by high frequency stimulation of perforant path was assessed. Materials and methods: In this experiment...

Development of an efficacious, non-addicting analgesic has been challenging. Discovery of novel mechanisms underlying addiction may present a solution. Here we target the neurokinin system, which is involved in both pain and addiction. Morphine exerts its rewarding actions, at least in part, by inhibiting GABAergic input onto substance P (SP) neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), subsequ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs), the post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression, play key roles in modulating many cellular processes. The changes in the expression profiles of several specific miRNAs affect the interactions between miRNA and their targets in various illnesses, including addiction, HIV, cancer etc. The presence of anti-HIV-1 microRNAs (which regulate the level of infectivity of HIV-...

Addiction is a major problem of society. The existing evidences have shown that parental addiction impairs CNS development, learning, and memory. With respect to the role of glutamate in dentate gyrus on learning and memory, in this study, the effect of parental addiction to morphine on extracellular glutamate concentration in dentate gyrus was evaluated. For this purpose, male and female rats ...