Your Brain on Coke

 Abstract

Your Brain on Coke

         Science Daily shared an article titled "This is Your Brain's Blood Vessels on Drugs" based on The Optical Society research which described the current scientific research done with cocaine and the brain of rats. Researchers from Stony Brook University paired with the National Institutes of Health; published these new studies in the Optical Society's journal Biomedical Express.  They include new methods on blood flow research in the brain. The methods can offer a new understanding of how the brain reacts with drugs.  Due to these affects being viewable, this type of research can be useful when it comes to treatment of drug abuse, cancer research, as well as surgery in the brain.  This experiment went a little bit like this: Rats were given cocaine, and a laser method was used to measure the cocaine affects on the rat brain. Science Daily offers a view of the rat's brains used in this experiment.  The first brain without drug interaction has a healthy blood flow through the vessels.  In the photograph of the rat brain that has been given cocaine, the blood vessels have a lack of blood flow and therefore present a dark color. 

The picture of the rat brains used in the article is below: 

(Disclaimer: photograph credit given to Biomedical Optics Express)

     Why is this recent study so extremely important to the research of brain flow?  According to this article, there have been major limitations in ability to view the actual images of drugs on brain vessels prior to this experiment.  The article explains how the knowledge of the effects of cocaine type drugs can create strokes and certain bleeding, but now this scientific breakthrough has allowed to view the vessels reaction to the substance in a new way. The method called optical coherence Doppler tomography (ODT) using laser lights was developed to measure the rate of blood flow. This is the primary method development in this experiment.

     The great thing about this research is the new method of viewing blood vessels in the brain does not have the same harmful side effects as past research potentially had. However, there are still some limitations to the new research.  One limitation is the sensitivity of the ODT method.  The Optical Society describes how it is not able to detect the slow capillary flows in the brain.  According to the Science Daily article, the second limitation is its inability to work if the vessel is "perpendicular to the incoming laser beam" (The Optical Society, 2014).  Aside from the limiting factors of this new science advancement, the article gives the example of how the ODT can help in tumor operations, along with viewing the growth and reduction patterns of the blood vessels in the brain with exposing them to substances.

Reference:

The Optical Society. (2014, August 28). This is your brain's blood vessels on drugs. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 31, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140828110911.htm