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Terminally ill patients often receive morphine to help them cope with severe pain. Yet chronic use of morphine and other opioids can backfire: not only can the drug’s effectiveness wane over time, but some patients find repeated doses make the pain feel even worse. Finding a way to block these long-term complications of morphine use would offer a major step forward in pain management, but the molecular mechanisms involved have been hard to unravel.
Now, researchers led by Wen-Li Mi at Fudan University in Shanghai have identified a cell-signaling sequence involved in both the tolerance and increased pain sensitivity (hyperalgesia) brought on by regular morphine use in mice. Suppressing this pathway in the animals turned off both side effects, raising the prospect that the same could be done in people, the researchers report September 7 in Science Signaling.
Venetia Zachariou, a neuroscientist and pharmacologist at the ...
