STUDY SHOWS HOW GLUE SNIFFING WORKS

Chemical In Industrial Solvents Moves Through Same Brain Regions As Heroin
And Cocaine

For years, scientists have beer unsure about what is happening it the
brains of people who sniff or 'huff' industrial solvents to get high. Now,
by looking at real brain images, a team of federal scientists has found
that a chemical common to paints and glues moves through precisely the same
brain regions as addictive drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

The first images of animal brains exposed to toluene, taken by scientists
at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, could
help confirm scientists' suspicions that inhalants are addictive.

"The theory has always been that the effects of solvents would not be very
specific - that if you breathe them in, they'd go everywhere equally," said
Stephen Dewey, a neuroanatomist and study co-author. "But, in fact, it
looks like there's a regional distribution. They go to specific regions
associated with reward and pleasure, just like other abused drugs. Then,
overtime, they redistribute."

The study, which was performed in baboons and mice, appears in today's
online version of the journal Life Sciences.

The team chose toluene because it is one of the most common industrial
solvents.

By the time they reach fourth grade, nearly 6 percent of U.S. children have
huffed inhalants, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. By
eighth grade, nearly 20 percent of all kids have tried them. Children who
sniff inhalants generally use available household products, ranging from
cigarette lighters and Liquid Paper to shoeshine and hairsprays.

Use of inhalants evokes a sense of euphoria. The health effects, though,
can be serious, ranging from brain damage and kidney failure to cardiac
arrest. Addiction experts also see huffing as a "gateway" to other drugs of
abuse, setting in motion a destructive pattern.

To label the toluene, Brookhaven chemists replaced some of the compound's
carbon atoms with a radioactive version, carbon-11, and injected that
substance into lab animals. The scientists chose to inject the substance
rather than have the animals inhale it because injected doses are easier to
measure and track.

The level of the radioactive substance was then measured using a positron
emission tomography or PET camera, which detects a signal emitted by the
substance, showing precisely where the toluene was located in the body and
tracking its location over time. "For the first time, we have shown in
living animals where the most commonly used solvent goes in the brain and
the whole body," said Dewey, who has conducted pioneering studies on
cocaine addiction.

Dewey got the idea for the study from his frequent visits to elementary
schools, where he speaks about drug abuse and his own addiction research
program. During his talks, he said, children consistently asked him about
huffing. "After about the third or fourth time someone asked me, I thought,
'What is this? Something must be going on.' Then I proposed the study."

The Brookhaven team has applied for grants to study other inhalants, first
in animals, then in humans. They are also working to develop a method to
study these chemicals in inhaled as well as injected form to better
understand the bodily processes affected by the substance.