CLUB DRUGS INFLICT DAMAGE SIMILAR TO TRAUMATIC BRAIN
INJURY

What do suffering a traumatic brain injury and using club drugs have
in common? University of Florida researchers say both may trigger a
similar chemical chain reaction in the brain, leading to cell death,
memory loss and potentially irreversible brain damage.

A series of studies at UF over the past five years has shown using
the popular club drug Ecstasy, also called MDMA, and other forms of
methamphetamine lead to the same type of brain changes, cell loss and
protein fluctuations in the brain that occur after a person endures
a sharp blow to the head, according to findings a UF researcher
presented at a Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego this
month.

"Using methamphetamine is like inflicting a traumatic brain injury on
yourself," said Firas Kobeissy, Ph.D., a postdoctoral associate in
the College of Medicine department of psychiatry. "We found that a
lot of brain cells are being injured by these drugs. That's alarming
to society now. People don't seem to take club drugs as seriously as
drugs such as heroin or cocaine."

Working with UF researchers Mark Gold, M.D., chief of the division of
addiction medicine at UF's McKnight Brain Institute and one of the
country's leading experts on addiction medicine, and Kevin Wang,
Ph.D, director of the UF Center for Neuroproteomics and Biomarkers
Research, Kobeissy compared what happened in the brains of rats given
large doses of methamphetamine with what happened to those that had
suffered a traumatic brain injury.

The group's research has already shown how traumatic brain injury
affects brain cells in rats. They found similar damage in the rats
exposed to methamphetamine. In the brain, club drugs set off a chain
of events that injures brain cells. The drugs seem to damage certain
proteins in the brain, which causes protein levels to fluctuate. When
proteins are damaged, brain cells could die. In addition, as some
proteins change under the influence of methamphetamine, they also
begin to cause inflammation in the brain, which can be deadly,
Kobeissy said.

Kobeissy and other researchers in Gold's lab are using novel protein
analysis methods to understand how drug abuse alters the brain.
Looking specifically at proteins in the rat cortex, UF researchers
discovered that about 12 percent of the proteins in this region of
the brain showed the same kinds of changes after either
methamphetamine use or traumatic brain injury. There are about 30,000
proteins in the brain so such a significant parallel indicates that a
similar mechanism is at work after both traumatic brain injury and
methamphetamine abuse, Kobeissy said.

"Sometimes people go to the clubs and take three tablets of Ecstasy
or speed," Kobeissy said. "That may be a toxic dose for them. Toxic
effects can be seen for methamphetamine, Ecstasy and traumatic injury
in different areas of the brain."

About 1.3 million people over the age of 12 reported using
methamphetamine in the previous month, according to the 2006 National
Survey on Drug Use and Health. In 2004, more than 12 million
Americans reported having tried the drug, the survey's findings show.

People often think the effects of drugs of abuse wear off in the body
the same way common medications do, but that may not be the case,
Gold said.

"These data and the previous four years of data suggest some drugs,
especially methamphetamine, cause changes that are not readily
reversible," Gold said. "Future research is necessary for us to
determine when or if methamphetamine-related brain changes reverse
themselves."

Gold and Dennis Steindler, Ph.D., director of UF's McKnight Brain
Institute and an expert on stem cells, are planning studies to find
out if stem cells can be applied to repair drug-related brain damage.

UF researchers are also trying to uncover all the various ways drugs
damage and kill brain cells. During their protein analysis,
researchers discovered that oxidation was damaging some proteins,
throwing the molecules chemically off balance.

"When proteins are oxidized they are not functional," Kobeissy said.
"When proteins are not working, the cell cannot function."

Neurologist Jean Lud Cadet, M.D., chief of the molecular
neuropsychiatry branch of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said
analyzing proteins is important to understanding how drugs such as
methamphetamine affect the brain.