ECSTASY USE MAY CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE, SAY SCIENTISTS

Scientists last night warned that the clubber's favourite drug, ecstasy,
could trigger long-term damage to vital brain cells called serotonin
neurons.

Serotonin is a brain chemical important in controlling mood. Although there
is still no hard evidence, researchers believe this damage could lead to
impaired memory, loss of self-control, increased levels of anxiety,
sleeplessness, appetite problems and even long-term psychiatric illness.

Ecstasy is the popular name for the "recreational" drug
methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. It is taken, sometimes on a weekly
basis, by hundreds of thousands of young people in Europe and the United
States. There has been a small number of deaths linked with the drug but
most users argue that it is safe.

But evidence from Britain, Italy and the US is beginning to tell a different
story. Tests on animals - rats, guinea pigs, monkeys and baboons - have
repeatedly and uniformly shown damage to parts of the brain that work with
serotonin.

Rat brain cells seem to recover. But Professor Una McCann of the US National
Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, said that seven years
after being treated to a four-day course of drugs, every monkey in a series
of labs across the world had shown signs of irreversible damage.

Now, she and colleagues told a conference in London yesterday, tests and
brain scans on human volunteers show similar damage.

George Ricaurte of the Johns Hopkins school of medicine in Baltimore,
Maryland, said many neuroscientists were now concerned at the possible
effect of this damage: users could be at greater risk of mood and sleep
disturbance, aggressive tendencies and anxiety.

The catch is that scientists can only work with volunteers who have already
become worried about the drug's effects.

The researchers are faced with other variables: they cannot be sure about
the amount, the frequency or the quality of the MDMA taken, or the role of
other drugs that might have been used. They have no information about users
who do not reveal their problems to doctors and they cannot ethically
conduct the kind of "double-blind" experiments which match large groups of
patients with control - the technique used to answer questions about
pharmaceutical drugs.

But they are in no doubt that ecstasy claims victims. Dr Fabrizio Schifano,
who heads an addiction treatment unit in Padua, said that at a conservative
estimate 50,000 to 85,000 young Italians took ecstasy in clubs on Saturday
nights. More than half of a group of 150 in Padua who had used the drug at
least once suffered from depression, psychotic disorders, cognitive
disturbances, bulimic episodes, impulse control disorders and social phobia.

"I know of no other recreational drugs," said Prof Ricaurte, "that prune
serotonin nerve cells in the brain, and do so without producing any
immediate and obvious change to the user to alert him or her that brain
injury has occurred. That is the reading of the available clinical
experience today.

"To me, the fact that we have a potent and selective neurotoxin in the brain
cells, and that it can produce these changes without giving an immediate
warning that something is amiss, to me that one of the most insidious
aspects of MDMA.

"It allows the user to continue using the drug for prolonged periods of
time, potentially sustaining greater and greater serotonin nerve cell
injury."

Andy Parrott, a psychologist at the University of East London, said he had
asked student users of ecstasy to rate their mood after taking the drug.
"Ecstasy users were rating high elation and euphoria, as you'd expect," Prof
Parrott said. "The thing was, the controls were almost as happy as the
ecstasy users.

"In other words, they were having a good time on a Saturday night. The
actual benefit of the drug was very slight.

"Two days later the ecstasy users had significant levels of depression,
sadness, bad temper, irritability: you name it, they were suffering from it.

"The controls were taking alcohol, or cannabis, a few were taking
amphetamines: their mood changes that week were very slight. The ecstasy
users' mood changes were really quite remarkable."

Checked-by: Don Beck