Abstract Background Crack-cocaine dependence is a serious public health issue, related to several psychiatric and psychosocial problems. users are usually embedded in context of great social vulnerability, often associated with violence, poverty, family conflict easy early access alcohol, tobacco other drugs. Methods This cross-sectional study enrolled consecutive sample 577 patients admitted 2...

Even though hair analysis often seems to be the best choice for retrospective monitoring of cocaine intake, differentiating between incorporated cocaine and external contamination is widely debated. In this study we report results obtained in 90 hair samples from addicts. All samples were analyzed for cocaine, benzoylecgonine, norcocaine, cocaethylene, and tropococaine by gas chromatography-mas...

Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) is known to metabolize cocaine in humans. In the present study, three different experiments were performed to determine whether the addition of horse serum-derived BChE would accelerate the metabolism of cocaine. In the first experiment, the addition of BChE to squirrel monkey plasma in vitro reduced the half-life of cocaine by over 80%, decreased the production of ...

Neuronal adaptations in striatal dopamine signaling have been implicated in enhanced responses to addictive drugs. Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) regulates striatal dopamine signaling and is a downstream target gene of the transcription factor DeltaFosB, which accumulates in striatal neurons after chronic cocaine exposure. Here we investigated the role of Cdk5 activity in the nucleus accumben...

Although cocaine-induced conditioned taste aversions (CTA) are well documented, little is known about the basis for cocaine's aversive effects. To address the role of serotonin (5-HT) in cocaine-induced aversions, the present experiments used the cross-drug preexposure design in which the effects of exposure to fluoxetine, a selective 5-HT reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) with 5-HT transporter (SERT) ...

The mechanism by which cocaine alters vascular tone is not fully understood. We determined the effects of cocaine on excitation-contraction coupling of isolated ferret aorta. Cocaine in concentrations less than or equal to 10(-4) M caused a contractile response in a dose-dependent manner. The response of control muscle was significantly larger than that in muscle from ferrets pretreated with re...

Cocaine exhibits prominent abuse liability, and chronic abuse can result in cocaine use disorder with significant morbidity. Major advances have been made in delineating neurobiological mechanisms of cocaine abuse; however, effective medications to treat cocaine use disorder remain to be discovered. The present review will focus on the role of serotonin (5-HT; 5-hydroxytryptamine) neurotransmis...

We have shown previously that footshock stress and priming injections of cocaine reinstate cocaine seeking in rats after prolonged drug-free periods (Erb et al., 1996). Here we examined the role of brain corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and the adrenal hormone corticosterone in stress- and cocaine-induced reinstatement of cocaine seeking in rats. The ability of footshock stress and priming ...

Mice and rats were tested for reduced sensitivity to cocaine-induced hyper-locomotion after pretreatment with anti-cocaine antibody or cocaine hydrolase (CocH) derived from human butyrylcholinesterase (BChE). In Balb/c mice, direct i.p. injection of CocH protein (1 mg/kg) had no effect on spontaneous locomotion, but it suppressed responses to i.p. cocaine up to 80 mg/kg. When CocH was injected ...

Early-life adversity increases the risk for emotional disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Anhedonia, thought to be a core feature of these disorders, is provoked by our naturalistic rodent model of childhood adversity (i.e., rearing pups for one week in cages with limited bedding and nesting, LBN). Drug use and addiction are highly comorbid with psychiatric disorders featuring anhed...