Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Can running help heroin withdrawals?

As we all know when a person run's they eventually fall into a euphoric state called "Runners High", which during this time your body releases endorphins and it calms the body to the point where you feel like you could run forever. Well anybody that has an avid running regime like myself know that when you don't run you feel semi guilty or don't have that same level of alertness as you would after you finish running for the day. WELL, scientists at Tufts University designed a program in which they divided 44 male rats and 40 female rats into four groups. One group was housed inside an exercise wheel, and another group had none. Each group was divided again, either allowing access to food for only one hour per day or for 24 hours per day. they were then all given Naloxone, a drug used to counteract an opiate overdose and produce immediate withdrawal symptoms and they changed the amounts the ran and ate over the next couple of wees. The active rats displayed a significantly higher level of withdrawal symptoms than the inactive rats on the dependency for the drug when they were deprived of food and/or running showing the benefit of running in the active rats to ease the withdrawal symptoms of food than the starved rats.. So therefore the scientists; in short, concluded that after weeks of having these particular rats on a strict running schedule compared to the ones that weren't, noticed an increased withdrawal symptoms for those active rats. Scientist are now hoping that they can come up with some short of treatment program for habitual drug users implementing running to absolve the withdrawal stresses with running by means of increasing endorphins and dopamines levels in the brain, instead of using clinical drugs that could be potentially harmful to the person.

1 comment:

  1. An interesting study and good overview. Consider adding the link to the original source in your blog.

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