Specific neurotransmitters affected by drugs: What is neurotransmission?
For us to better understand the specific neurotransmitters affected by drugs, we must appreciate certain facts. Like for instance, any victim of substance abuse experiences directly reflects on the functional roles of a given neurotransmitter whose activity is being disrupted. Each individual neuron manufactures one or more neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, or any one of a dozen others that scientists have discovered to date. Each neurotransmitter is associated with particular effects depending on its distribution among the brain’s various functional areas. Dopamine, for example, is highly concentrated in regions that regulate motivation and feelings of reward, accounting for its importance in compulsive behaviors such as drug abuse.
A neurotransmitter’s impact also depends on whether it stimulates or dampens activity in its target neurons says doctor Dalal Akoury, MD, President and founder of AWAREmed Health and Wellness Resource Center. It is also worth noting that ordinarily, some drugs will disrupt one neurotransmitter or class of neurotransmitters. Like for instance, those individuals who are struggling with opioid may experience changes which are similar and more noticeable than those that accompany normal fluctuations in the brain’s natural opioid-like neurotransmitters, endorphin and enkephalin: increased analgesia, decreased alertness, and slowed respiration. Other drugs interact with more than one type of neurotransmitter.
Because a neurotransmitter often stimulates or inhibits a cell that produces a different neurotransmitter, a drug that alters one can have secondary impacts on another. In fact, the key effect that all abused drugs appear to have in common is a dramatic increase in dopamine signaling in the nucleus accumbens leading to euphoria and a desire to repeat the experience. For example, nicotine stimulates dopamine-releasing cells directly by stimulating their acetylcholine receptors, and also indirectly by triggering higher levels of glutamate, a neurotransmitter that acts as an accelerator for neuron activity throughout the brain.
Specific neurotransmitters affected by drugs: Changes which occurs with chronic drug abuse
During the early phase of an individual’s drug experimentation, specific neurotransmission normalizes as intoxication wears off and the substance leaves the brain. Eventually, however, drugs wreak changes in cellular structure and function that lead to long-lasting or permanent neurotransmission abnormalities. These alterations underlie drug tolerance, addiction, withdrawal, and other persistent consequences.
Some longer term changes begin as adjustments to compensate for drug-induced increases in neurotransmitter signaling intensities. For example, drug tolerance typically develops because sending cells reduce the amount of neurotransmitter they produce and release, or receiving cells withdraw receptors or otherwise dampen their responsiveness. Scientists have shown, for example, that cells withdraw opioid receptors into their interiors (where they cannot be stimulated) when exposed to some opioid drugs; when exposed to morphine, however, cells appear instead to make internal adjustments that produce the same effect reduced responsiveness to opiate drugs and natural opioids. Over time, this and related changes recalibrate the brain’s responsiveness to opioid stimulation downward to a level where the organ needs the extra stimulation of the drug to function normally; without the drug, withdrawal occurs.
Specific neurotransmitters affected by drugs: What is neurotransmission?
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