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MDMA neurotoxicity

specialspack

specialspack

Bluelighter
Joined
May 8, 2001
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Post the whole Ricaute meth debacle, what's the most up-to-date general consensus on SERT "pruning"?

I've read the Baggot/Mendelson paper - what other work has been done in the past five years by respected independent labs that supports or denies the fact of neurotoxicity in humans and/or animals?
 
bilz0r has posted quite a few studies regarding MDMA neurotoxicity but i honestly don't think scientists have a definitive answer on whether MDMA is actually neurotoxic or not.

it was also said that the Ricaute papers are completely wrong because of a possible mix up with MDMA and methamphetamines being given to the animals.

here are some helpful threads:

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=223611&highlight=neurotoxicity

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=222039&highlight=neurotoxicity

and some helpful websites:

http://thedea.org/neurotoxicity.html

http://www.maps.org

 
The closest thing to a consensus opinion would probably be 'MDMA is unquestionably neurotoxic at some doses; whether that includes the dosages taken by recreational users is unclear.'

MY opinion is that MDMA does not destroy axons at moderate recreational doses. My MDMA neurotoxicity page is probably the most thorough argument/research review defending that perspective.

The Dancesafe MDMA Neurotoxicity page has also recently been completely re-written; it's not nearly as detailed, but is more accessible to the layperson and more or less hits the same topics.
 
^ Indeed. In animals, MDMA is definately neurotoxic.

The neuropsychological data pretty clearly shows that MDMA-users have problems. As always with retrospective studies (i.e. things measured after the drug) you can say "maybe MDMA users have problems to start with" (the same arguement made about cannabis-psychosis). But I always doubt these arguements.

But of course, cognitive changes don't mean neurotoxicity, they just mean physiological changes. But I don't think it matters whether it's true neurotoxicity or just a change; if it's associated with a negative cognitive change, it's bad.
 
Indeed. In animals, MDMA is definately neurotoxic.


But only when injected directly into their brains in massive amounts for days on end.

The neuropsychological data pretty clearly shows that MDMA-users have problems

Or it might just show that the kind of people who apply to go in for tests on the dangers of ecstasy have problems. The millions of people who use Ecstasy and don't have problems are never going to feature in such studies. That's why you hear so much about the 0.001% of people who get "cannabis psychosis" as opposed to the 99.99% who get the giggles, eat a twinky and go to sleep.
 
Ismene said:
Or it might just show that the kind of people who apply to go in for tests on the dangers of ecstasy have problems. The millions of people who use Ecstasy and don't have problems are never going to feature in such studies. That's why you hear so much about the 0.001% of people who get "cannabis psychosis" as opposed to the 99.99% who get the giggles, eat a twinky and go to sleep.
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Well said. It seems that these tests are by-and-large non-representative of the average recreational e-user. While I'm sure there are neurotoxic effects at some dose...what drug (alcohol, pseudoephedrine, dxm, acetiminophen, etc.) isn't? It's surely a very high dosage if you are talking about MDMA only.

As psychological research is based almost always on voluntary participants...they can't really declare those results universal. It seems to me that the psychological effects are more related to one's previous internal standing (before the drug) than can be attributed to MDMA.

I do however think that the drug can cause "brain damage" in one sense of the word. There is semi-conclusive research on the overstimulation of receptors, that is indicative of long-term depression. They stain the serotonin and observe it as it travels through the brain. In chimps the results showed that there was significantly less dendrite-serotonin absorption than before MDMA. This may be due to the recession of overstimulated receptors, or even physical damage to those receptors.
 
ndeed. In animals, MDMA is definately neurotoxic.


But only when injected directly into their brains in massive amounts for days on end.
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MDMA absolutely isn't neurotoxic in animals when it is injected directly into animals brain[1, 2] and classical neurotoxic dose regiems don't involve multi day dosing, they take place of 4 or 8 hours (usually something like 10mg/kg x 4 every 2 hours).

You really need to check your facts before you make such absurd statements.

The neuropsychological data pretty clearly shows that MDMA-users have problems

Or it might just show that the kind of people who apply to go in for tests on the dangers of ecstasy have problems
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Yes, as I said, problem with retrospective studies.
 
classical neurotoxic dose regiems don't involve multi day dosing, they take place of 4 or 8 hours (usually something like 10mg/kg x 4 every 2 hours).


From the link above:

The animal toxicity data is also based on injecting animals with the drug (as much as 50.0 mg/kg, when a human would get plastered at about 2.0 mg/kg.) Injecting a drug bypasses the digestive tract and delivers the drug into the bloodstream much more quickly than taking a drug orally would. As a result, an animal that gets an injection is exposed to much higher peak concentrations of the drug. (In fact, Ricaurte's own research found that injecting MDMA could as much as triple its neurotoxicity over oral dosing (depending on brain region))[1]

Before-and-after images of monkey brain frontal lobes. The bright lines are serotonin axons (chemically treated to stand out.) These monkeys were injected with 10 mg/kg of MDMA a day for four days strait by Ricaurte.[16]


You really need to check your facts before you make such absurd statements.


So they're injected with massive amounts but not directly into their brains. Ok. My point still holds. Humans arn't injected with massive amounts for days on end.
 
^ there are also studies showing that in rats, oral dosing is comparable to injection, and in primates the issue is more complicated - according to the Baggott paper:

"In the rat, subcutaneous injection and oral administration of MDMA produce comparable 5-HT depletions in the hippocampus (Finnegan, 1988). Studies with nonhuman primates have yielded less consistent results. In the squirrel monkey, Ricaurte (1988a) found that repeated oral administration of MDMA resulted in only one-half to two-thirds as much 5-HT depletion as the equivalent subcutaneous dose. In the rhesus monkey, in contrast, Kleven (1989) reported that repeated oral administration of MDMA produced twice the decrease in hippocampal SERT activity as was produced by repeated subcutaneous injection. These apparent differences between nonhuman primate species increase the difficulty of assessing the risk of oral MDMA administration in humans"

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma_neurotoxicity1.shtml
 
You need to actually read the experimental reports. As I both theDEA and I said, MDMA, at the right dose, in neurotoxic to experimental animals. There is no debate on this subject. Most experiments do no involve dosing over several days, functional neurotoxicity can be induced with doses at 5mg/kg x 4.... or a single doses of 10mg/kg...

You can jump into an arguement between de la torre, nichols and ricuarte about dose scalling all you want, it's quite extensive... I don't pretend to know about it... surface area scaling, volume scaling... neither make sense to me...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/..._uids=15380932&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ract&list_uids=15681020&itool=pubmed_Abstract
 
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Alright, this is not scientific, but here's my opinion, and I'm pretty sure I'm right. Yes, MDMA causes brain damage. Brain damage doesn't mean you're stupid, you can't read, you're bad at math, and you can't wipe properly. We could be talking simply about memory problems, or mood changes. Here's my semi-proof. You know how you feel after you've rolled real hard? Like the next day, when your thoughts drag through the mud but you still feel good? I think that's neurotoxicity at work. Do I care? No. I just took ecstacy. How about when you're rolling hardcore and you overwork yourself and your heart feel like it's beating strangly fast or irregular when you know you took good pills because you tested them (or made them, or whatever) yourself? I think that's neurotoxicity at work once more. Do small doses do it? I don't know, I doubt it, but small doses aren't that much fun are they? 1 glass of wine isn't that relaxing, is it? 1 hit of weed kind of sucks, doesn't it? I know that probably not everyone experiences ill effects from ecstacy, but I do and so does everyone I've ever met. And can anyone say that they've rolled for like 5 weeks (or insert your own record here) before and not felt some sort of depression or lack of motivation? I rest my case here. BTW, I LOVE ECSTACY.
 
As I both theDEA and I said, MDMA, at the right dose, in neurotoxic to experimental animals. There is no debate on this subject

Yeah but so what? What does injecting a massive amount into a rat have to do with a human taking an oral dose? Even if we were talking humans injection is a massively different thing to taking a drug orally. It's like trying to prove something about drinking and then saying your experiment involved injecting whiskey into someone for 4 days straight.

Most experiments do no involve dosing over several days, functional neurotoxicity can be induced with doses at 5mg/kg x 4.... or a single doses of 10mg/kg...


We'll have to disagree on this one because i've got Julie Hollands book in front of me and it quotes researchers as saying "Most experiments into mdma neurotoxicity involved dosing over several consecutive days".
 
TheTwighlight said:
Alright, this is not scientific, but here's my opinion, and I'm pretty sure I'm right. Yes, MDMA causes brain damage. Brain damage doesn't mean you're stupid, you can't read, you're bad at math, and you can't wipe properly. We could be talking simply about memory problems, or mood changes. Here's my semi-proof. You know how you feel after you've rolled real hard? Like the next day, when your thoughts drag through the mud but you still feel good? I think that's neurotoxicity at work. Do I care? No. I just took ecstacy. How about when you're rolling hardcore and you overwork yourself and your heart feel like it's beating strangly fast or irregular when you know you took good pills because you tested them (or made them, or whatever) yourself? I think that's neurotoxicity at work once more. Do small doses do it? I don't know, I doubt it, but small doses aren't that much fun are they? 1 glass of wine isn't that relaxing, is it? 1 hit of weed kind of sucks, doesn't it? I know that probably not everyone experiences ill effects from ecstacy, but I do and so does everyone I've ever met. And can anyone say that they've rolled for like 5 weeks (or insert your own record here) before and not felt some sort of depression or lack of motivation? I rest my case here. BTW, I LOVE ECSTACY.
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No offence intended, but subjective effects don't particularly count. What does neurotoxicity "feel like"? There's plenty of neurotoxic drugs which don't feel terribly bad at the time, and plenty of non-neurotoxic ones which can make you feel truly awful.
 
Well, to put it bluntly, Julie Holland is full of shit. There are undoubtabley studies where dosing is done over days. The McCann/Ricaurte/Yuan lab always do either 10 or 20mg/kg every 2 hours x 4, and they're probably the single biggest neurotoxicity lab. Sprague and Nichols tend to do single 20-40mg/kg dose and they're probably the next biggest group.

While there has never been a systematic review of dosage, Matthew Baggots review[1] pretty clearly shows that single day dosing regeims are the most common.
 
The interspecies scaling is complicated but I've personally no doubt that a lot of recreational users verge on those doses used in the aforementioned animal studies.

Taken orally, MDMA is less neurotoxic in animals but the pattern of neurotoxicity is still as evident.

From the preliminary results of my questionnaire, there are lots of people whose ecstasy use appears to be verging on those sort of doses (e.g., 5mg/kg in monkeys) administered to animals.

You've got to think and act responsibly with MDMA, there's no way of getting round it, no matter how much you love the acute effects
 
From the preliminary results of my questionnaire, there are lots of people whose ecstasy use appears to be verging on those sort of doses (e.g., 5mg/kg in monkeys) administered to animals.


How do you know what dose they are taking?

You've got to think and act responsibly with MDMA, there's no way of getting round it, no matter how much you love the acute effects

Then again, alcohol is massively neurotoxic and toxic to just about every organ in your body. And people drink alcohol far more frequently than they take ecstasy. But it's still perfectly possible to use alcohol safely.
 
I've seen people who've abused alcohol suffering from massive brain damage to the extent that they are unable to walk or speak. I've yet to see anyone suffer such brain damage from E and I'm sure if there were such people they would be splashed all over the press.
 
I just feel MDMA does damage to my body, I don't need any scientists to figure that out for me. Most scientific studies give a result the way the funder wants it. With the same test results you can conclude differently.

If we're talking roughly once/3weeks use here, I'd have to say that my memory got worse, I got depressed at random times, I was anxious, etc.. All indicating that there were changes in my brain("brain damage"). Is this damage permanent? I strongly believe not. Just look at is as a very long comedown, taking months or years depending on how hard you abused it.
On the other hand, I do think there is psychological damage from being constantly depressed, retarded and anxious. Not for everyone though, it depends on a person's psyche, unlike brain damage, since chemically we're all roughly the same.

My 2 cents
 
Most scientific studies give a result the way the funder wants it
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That's probably the silliest thing I think I've ever seen you say.
 
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