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nabraxas

Natural-born painkiller found in human saliva

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22:00 13 November 2006

Saliva from humans has yielded a natural painkiller up to six times more powerful than morphine, researchers say.

The substance, dubbed opiorphin, may spawn a new generation of natural painkillers that relieve pain as well as morphine but without the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug.

When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.

The substance was so successful at blocking pain that, in a test involving a platform of upended pins, the rats needed six times as much morphine as opiorphin to render them oblivious to the pain of standing on the needle points.

Anti-depressive angle

“Its pain-suppressive effect is like that of morphine,” says Catherine Rougeot at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, who led the research. “But we have to test its side effects as it is not a pure painkiller,” she says. “It may also be an anti-depressive molecule.”

Rougeot and colleagues discovered that opiorphin works in nerve cells of the spine by stopping the usual destruction of natural pain-killing opiates there, called enkephalins.

Opiorphin is such a simple molecule that it should be possible to synthesise it and produce large quantities without having to isolate it from saliva, Rougeot explains. Alternatively, it might be possible to find drugs which trigger patients’ bodies to produce more of the molecule themselves.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 103, p 17979)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1051...an-saliva-.html

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...The substance was so successful at blocking pain that, in a test involving a platform of upended pins, the rats needed six times as much morphine as opiorphin to render them oblivious to the pain of standing on the needle points.

I wonder how much of this substance a researcher would need to kill the pain of a broken nose... :angry:

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have uploaded the article, it's a little dense though.

The substance, dubbed opiorphin, may spawn a new generation of natural painkillers that relieve pain as well as morphine but without the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug.

it's interesting, surely anything that eventually acts on mu opioid receptors would be addictive?

after all, heroin was initially believed to be the non-addictive answer to morphine

or is it more a matter of preventing pain by stopping the signals from the spine being sent to the brain?

but if you were in pain and opiorphin was a potent analgesic, wouldn't it would become addictive to you regardless of how it worked?

opiorphin.pdf

opiorphin.pdf

opiorphin.pdf

Edited by twix elbert

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I've always licked my wounds and in my old job I had some bad ones....guess it shows I was born in the year of the dog :wink:

Well overdue for a tetanus shot too :P

How do you think we evolved???

I'm sure a book didn't fall from the sky!!

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When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.

AFAIK, lab rats are fairly big yeah? somewhere around 500g, hell even if they were 250g then they are gettin hit with 250mg of the opiorphan or 750mg of morph. Now i know they are lab rats and prolly get hit with shit all the time but FFS that is a mad habit them little fellas have got themselves into. 250mg of morph would turn me into a moaning spewing mess and these little fellas can tolerate 250mg of a substance 3 times more powerful than morph??? :scratchhead:

why do they need these little fellas to test painkillers anyways, i gladly put my hand up to test any new age opio based drug :lol:

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why do they need these little fellas to test painkillers anyways, i gladly put my hand up to test any new age opio based drug :lol:

even MPTP? :scratchhead:

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he he he - all forum dwellers - spit and save your saliva - send it to all to 1 chemist and have em make an extract for us!

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even MPTP? :scratchhead:

yeah nice one :rolleyes: ........ you first T.

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Rougeot and colleagues discovered that opiorphin works in nerve cells of the spine by stopping the usual destruction of natural pain-killing opiates there, called enkephalins.
Wow, I've never heard of a drug acting this way on opioids - is this a first? Can someone please link to the full paper? - I can't find it.
250mg of morph would turn me into a moaning spewing mess and these little fellas can tolerate 250mg of a substance 3 times more powerful than morph???

Just generally, rats tolerate drugs a bit better than we do. We use their responses as a guide, but only to guess at doses, and should never expect results to be closer than a magnitude or so (i.e. 10X more or less).

I have had mature pet Rattus Norvegicus' ranging from 200 to about 400g, although I did find this:"in some stocks of male Sprague-Dawley rats, average control body weight has risen from 550 g in the 1970s to over 900g in the 1990s (Keenan et al.)", I think most lab strains are still 500g or less. Also, rats are incapable of vomiting, so they often "tolerate" drugs because they don't have a choice.

it's interesting, surely anything that eventually acts on mu opioid receptors would be addictive?

after all, heroin was initially believed to be the non-addictive answer to morphine

or is it more a matter of preventing pain by stopping the signals from the spine being sent to the brain?

but if you were in pain and opiorphin was a potent analgesic, wouldn't it would become addictive to you regardless of how it worked?

Of course if you take a painkiller for ongoing pain and then stop, your original pains will return. However, being dependent on a drug to block pain so you can function does not necessarily mean that you are physically addicted or will suffer withdrawal symptoms when you stop. In the case of opiates, all of the agonist types are addictive to some degree, regardless of pharmaceutical company hype (I'm looking at you here, Tramadol). This doesn't mean there are no exceptions, just that we haven't found any. And there are still opiates which may be less addictive than others - in some situations, this could be life-changing to the patients involved. Buprenorphine, a partial mu-agonist, has shown some promise, as did mitragynine before it was banned - guess they already had Tramadol, huh? Also, a recent (small) study - see here - suggested that using opiate-antagonist naltrexone in teensy amounts concurrently with an opiate agonist (in this case high-dose codeine) could prevent withdrawal symptoms.

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Can someone please link to the full paper? - I can't find it.

LOL. ahem, that was done a few posts ago.

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