Cocaine Overdose can Literally Make Your Brain Eat Itself

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Overdose on cocaine can literally make one's brain eat itself, a study suggests. With this high-dose study in mouse, the drug is found to become a trigger to its own cells.

The Telegraph reports that the process by which the cells literally eat themselves, autophagy, is triggered when cocaine is taken in high doses. However, if the drug is taken in a regular dose, it leads autophagy to some valuable clean-up service, which is to get rid of unnecessary and unwanted debris that can be dissolved by enzymes with the cell "bags" or "pockets."

"Autophagy is the housekeeper that takes out the trash - it's usually a good thing. But cocaine makes the housekeeper throw away really important things, like mitochondria, which produce energy for the cell," Dr. Prasun Guha, lead researcher from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the U.S., has said. The study has been published in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Guha explains that autophagy is a cell that is always generating trash like a household. However, cocaine is the housekeeper that can throw away irrelevant things such as mitochondria that produces energy for the cell. He and other scientists have carried out autopsies that showed crystal clear signs of autophagy-influenced cell death in the brains of mice, as the test subjects, that have been given high doses of the drug.

According to EurekAlert, on the other hand, Professor Solomon Snyder, who is also from Johns Hopkins University' Neuroscience, reveals that his team has examined clues in the nerve cells from mouse brains. The cells can die from severely high temperatures, physical trauma, and toxins; however, they can also commit "suicide" through three different ways that are chemically controlled and programmed by some distinct proteins.

The team measures protein levels' changes that control each cell death and it observes the changes of the cells physically. The team then notices that cocaine has caused neuronal cell death when autophagy is uncontrollably triggered. It confirms the previous results from other groups that have found cocaine-influenced autophagy in microglia and astrocytes that are known as neuron support cells.

Professor Snyder is hoping that their team's work can lead to eventual treatments that will protect infants and adults from the highly destructive effects of cocaine on the brain. It is cautioned that more years of studies are needed to definitely show whether or not clinical trials are effective for preventing brain damage due to cocaine.