Heroin "overdose" death: contribution of drug-associated environmental cues

Some professional and scientific problems and opportunities for biofeedback

This paper will deal with a variety of topics such as dangers and opportunities from the developing crisis in health care costs, a cooperative study of the cost-effectiveness of treatments for headaches, the need for a federation of related societies, exploiting remarkable electronic advances, the wide range of adaptive functions of visceral learning (including its role in homeostasis), why maladjustments occur and their implications for biofeedback, and the need for analytic experiments involving adequate amounts of training.

Psychosocial predictors of sudden death: a review and critique

Research and selected case studies concerning psychosocial prediction of sudden death are evaluated under three categories: sudden cardiac, sudden infant and sudden traumatic death. The psychosocial predictors reviewed include novelty-pre-exposure, control-helplessness, restraint, Type A behavior, life change, bereavement, denial, social support and contact, voodoo, psychiatric illness, mother infant separation, submission-defeat, housing, handling and environmental enrichment. Four of these predictors, controllability-helplessness, pre-exposure-novelty, depressive affect and physical restraint are repeatedly cited in both human and animal studies and their importance is critically evaluated. Methodological and substantive recommendations for future research are made and a discussion of possible mechanisms is presented.

A study of the endogenous opioid system in the sudden infant death syndrome

To investigate the possible role of the endogenous opioid system in the pathogenesis of the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), we measured met-enkephalin immunoreactivity by radioimmunoassay in brain, lung, and adrenal glands of SIDS victims and of infants (controls) dying of nonneurologic causes. Met-enkephalin was stable in brain tissue up to 24 hours after death. On inspection, met-enkephalin levels in the cerebral cortex of SIDS victims were similar to those in controls. Levels in the caudate nucleus were lower in infants than in adults. In the medulla, the levels in SIDS cases and controls were not found to differ significantly. The linear relationship between the levels in the medulla and age was not detectably different in SIDS and controls. However, as a subset, levels in the control group significantly decreased with increasing age (P = 0.005), whereas levels in the SIDS group showed no correlation with age (P = 0.33). Levels of met-enkephalin in the adrenal gland of SIDS victims were similar to those in controls and were considerably lower than adult values. Lung tissue was assayed for beta-endorphin immunoreactivity and met-enkephalin: for both peptides the values in SIDS cases were low (femtomolar range) and similar to those in controls. These data suggest that met-enkephalin is not markedly overproduced in brains of SIDS victims. Future postmortem studies should focus on more subtle evidence of endogenous opioid overactivity such as differences in age related changes, receptor number, and levels of other endogenous opioid peptides.

Prior behavioral experience can reverse the effects of morphine

Morphine administration typically decreases responding of squirrel monkeys trained to avoid electric shock. However, the rate-decreasing effects of morphine on avoidance responding were reversed after either concurrent or prior exposure to a condition in which responding was maintained by shock presentation. These findings demonstrate that behavioral experience can play a significant role in determining the behavioral effects of drugs and that specific types of environmental conditions can completely reverse the usual effects those drugs have on behavior.