ECSTASY AND LOUD MUSIC ARE A BAD MIX

Partygoers who take the recreational drug ecstasy may face a greater risk of
long-term brain damage if they bombard themselves with loud music all night
long.

The warning follows experiments in rats that were simultaneously
exposed to loud noise and MDMA, aka ecstasy. The noise both
intensified and prolonged the effects of the drug on the animals' brains.

Michelangelo Iannone of Italy's Institute of Neurological Science in
Catanzaro and his colleagues gave rats varying doses of MDMA while
bombarding them with white noise for 3 hours at the maximum volume
permitted in Italian nightclubs.

Those given the highest dose of ecstasy, equivalent to the average
amount taken by a partygoer on a night out, experienced a slump in
electrical power of the cerebral cortex for up to five days after the
noise was switched off. Previous studies suggest that such loss of
power is related to brain hyperactivity and can ultimately lead to
depression.

Rats on high doses that were not exposed to noise, and those exposed
to noise but given lower doses of MDMA, experienced equally large
slumps in brain power, but these only lasted for about one day (BMC
Neuroscience, DOI :10.1186/1471-2202-7-13).

Since the experiments were in rats, it is hard to work out what the
results mean for humans, but they do suggest that we need to know more
about how ecstasy users are affected by their environment. "The most
important finding is that the effects of MDMA can be strengthened by
common environmental factors, such as noise in discotheques," says
Iannone.

His findings echo previous research by Jenny Morton of the University
of Cambridge, who discovered that a combination of methamphetamine (or
speed) and loud, pulsing music is much more damaging to mice than
either stimulus alone (New Scientist, 3 November 2001, p 17). White
noise had no effect on the mice in her experiments. "If Iannone's team
had used loud, pulsing noise, their effects would probably have been
even stronger," she says.

She agrees that more research into the combined effect of music and
drugs on humans is needed. "It would be tragic to find that taking
ecstasy in clubs as a teenager significantly increased the risk of
mental illness in later life," she says.

Andy Parrott at the University of Wales in Swansea, UK, has carried
out an analysis of the combined effects of ecstasy and environmental
factors, which is expected to be published in the Journal of
Psychopharmacology in April. "From the long-term health perspective,
dances and raves may well be the worst venues in which to take MDMA,"
he says. "Dancing, heat and noise may all boost the acute effects of
MDMA, but these same factors will also exacerbate the long-term
adverse effects."