Morphine is an opioid analgesic drug commonly used for pain relief in cancer patients. Here, we report that morphine enhances the mammosphere forming capacity and increases the expression of stemness-related transcription factors Oct4, Sox2 and Nanog. Treatment with morphine leads to enrichment of a side population fraction in MCF-7 cells and the CD44+/CD24(-/low) population in BT549 cells. Con...

Background & Objective: Non-opioid analgesics are often used to supplement opioids for the management of postoperative pain. This study examined the opioid-sparing effectiveness, analgesic efficacy and tolerability of preoperative administration of the oral cyclooxygenase 2 selective inhibitor, etoricoxib, in gynecological laparotomies. Method: 60 patients ASA physical status 1&11 were randomly...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effects of intrathecal morphine on pulmonary function, analgesia, and morphine plasma concentrations after cardiac surgery. INTRODUCTION Lung dysfunction increases morbidity and mortality after cardiac surgery. Regional analgesia may improve pulmonary outcomes by reducing pain, but the occurrence of this benefit remains controversial. METHODS Forty-two patients we...

BACKGROUND The feasibility of drug monitoring of serum concentrations of morphine, morphine-6-glucuronide (M6G) and morphine-3-glucuronide (M3G) during chronic morphine therapy is not established. One important factor relevant to drug monitoring is to what extent morphine, M6G and M3G serum concentrations fluctuate during stable morphine treatment. METHODS We included twenty-nine patients adm...

As a follow-up study to an earlier report that racemic fenfluramine can acutely potentiate the analgesic effects of morphine in humans, we investigated the effects of fenfluramine on the development of tolerance to morphine analgesia in rats. Antinociceptive effect, as measured by the tail-flick latency, was studied over 8 days in rats that received continuous i.v. infusion of 1) 22 mg/kg/day o...

Opiate dependence and withdrawal have long been hypothesized to enhance the reinforcing effects of opiates; however, opiate agonist self-administration in these states has yet to be systematically assessed. To address this issue, the reinforcing property of the short-acting -opioid agonist, remifentanil, was assessed in morphine-dependent (MD), morphine-dependent and -withdrawn (MW), and nondep...

The mechanistic similarity between acutely and chronically induced morphine tolerance has been previously proposed but remains largely unexplored. Our experiments examined the modulation of acutely induced tolerance to spinally administered morphine by agonists that affect the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor and nitric oxide synthase systems. Antinociception was detected via the hot water (52.5 d...

Drug addiction is considered as a chronic, recurrent brain disease characterized by relapse. Repeated exposure to certain drugs, such as morphine, can produce deleterious sequelae, such as drug dependence, tolerance and compulsive drug seeking. In the present study, we investigated the dependence and psychological craving for morphine in rats using the conditioned place preference (CPP) paradig...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The effects of ketamine in attenuating morphine tolerance have been suggested to result from a pharmacodynamic interaction. We studied whether ketamine might increase brain morphine concentrations in acute coadministration, in morphine tolerance and morphine withdrawal. EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH Morphine minipumps (6 mg·day(-1) ) induced tolerance during 5 days in Sprague-D...

previous studies have shown that the extract of papaver rhoeas reduces morphine dependence, locomotor activity and reward. in present study, the effects of hydro-alcohol extract of papaver rhoeas on the tolerance to analgesic effects of morphine in mice have been investigated using tail flick method. subcutaneous (s.c.) administration of morphine (1, 2, 5 and 10 mg/kg) induced analgesia. howeve...