Answer Addiction

Tag: opiates

  • Poppy Seed Bagel Triggers Positive Drug Test For New Mom

    Poppy Seed Bagel Triggers Positive Drug Test For New Mom

    The new mom told the doctor she had eaten a poppy seed bagel but the state had already been notified of the positive drug test. 

    On the day of her daughter’s birth, Elizabeth Eden, a mom from Baltimore County, Maryland, did not expect to fail the routine drug test because of her breakfast that morning.

    “I was in labor. I was sitting in bed. I was having contractions. I was on a Pitocin drip, and the doctor came in and said, ‘You’ve tested positive for opiates,’” the new mom said, according to WBAL-TV. “I said, ‘Well, can you test me again? And I ate a poppy seed bagel this morning for breakfast,’ and she said, ‘No, you’ve been reported to the state.”

    That was in April. Beatrice, the newborn, was monitored in the hospital for five days, and the state did a home check-up. The case is now closed, but Eden said the ordeal was “traumatizing.”

    She’s written a letter to St. Joseph Medical Center, urging the hospital to raise the threshold for a positive drug test, or at least inform new moms about it.

    Poppy seeds come from the same opium poppy plant that heroin, morphine and oxycodone are derived from, and can thus trigger a positive result on a drug test.

    Research has shown that just a teaspoon of poppy seeds can raise a person’s opioid levels to 1,200 nanograms per milliliter. However, St. Joseph’s threshold is much lower—300 nanograms per milliliter.

    The chief of the department of OBGYN at the hospital explained that the low threshold is meant to be on the safe side. If you raise the bar, “you would only identify true positives, but you would also miss quite a few individuals who did use drugs and were considered screened negative,” said Dr. Judith Rossiter-Pratt.

    This isn’t the first time a new mom was snagged by a drug test because of a seemingly innocent meal.

    In April 2010, new parents Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, of New Castle, Pennsylvania, were settling in with their infant daughter, when state authorities arrived at the home with a “court order to remove the three-day-old infant,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania reported.

    Mort had yielded a positive drug test in the hospital, only to find out later that it was triggered by an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts she’d had two hours before arriving at the hospital.

    Another woman from the same Pennsylvania county had had a pasta salad with poppy seed dressing, triggering a positive result, and the state to take her newborn for 75 days.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Link Between Heroin Addiction And Narcolepsy Examined

    Link Between Heroin Addiction And Narcolepsy Examined

    Could opiates be the key to treating the chronic sleep disorder?

    Heroin could be the next big breakthrough in treating narcolepsy. 

    That’s one possibility raised in a paper published recently in the journal Science Translational Medicine, detailing new work probing the connection between addiction and the chronic sleep disorder.a

    When narcoleptics nod off or lose muscle control, it’s caused by a lack of hypocretin in the brain. But to probe the connection further between the wakefulness-controlling chemical and the sleep disorder linked to it, researchers started studying the brains of dead narcoleptics. In the process, they stumbled across one brain that stood out. 

    It had a lot more hypocretin-producing cells than the other brains – and then the researchers learned that person had been addicted to heroin. So the scientists decided to start looking at the brains of people who had struggled with opioid use disorder before their deaths.

    In the first four samples they studied, researchers found the opioid-addicted brains had an average of 54% more hypocretin-producing cells than regular brains. 

    “So it was natural to ask if opiates would reverse narcolepsy,” study co-author Jerry Siegel, a neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles, told Gizmodo.

    The next step, Siegel explained, was trying a study with mice. 

    Over a two-week period, researchers drugged up narcoleptic mice with regular doses of morphine. The experiment upped their hypocretin-making cells, and the effect lasted for a few weeks after scientists cut off the dosage. 

    Basically, the researchers said, the opiates wake up dormant cells that make the necessary chemical. 

    “Understanding why opiates ‘awaken’ these cells is a task for the future,” Siegel said. 

    But other scientists voiced reservations about the work. Even if opioids turn out to be an effective treatment in humans, there are practical limitations. 

    “No mother of a 15-year-old with narcolepsy would sign onto us giving them several doses of morphine a day,” sleep expert Thomas Scammell of Harvard Medical School told Gizmodo.

    Yet, the findings could herald new hope for addiction treatment. If opiates users have more neurons that make hypocretin, the researchers suggested, then maybe they need less. 

    “If chronic use of opioids is increasing hypocretin production—and the authors show that nicely—then that could amplify the rewarding aspects of these drugs, making addiction all that much worse,” Scammell said. “I think that’s actually the most interesting part of their research.”

    View the original article at thefix.com