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PhytoExtractum Shop: Buy Bali Kratom Powder

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InvisibleDiploidM
Cuban


Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 01/09/03
Posts: 19,274
Loc: Rabbit Hole
I've Got An Itch!
    #7231988 - 07/27/07 09:04 PM (16 years, 7 months ago)

Hmm... I wonder if this works on Opiate Itch? :rofl:

--

Are you scratching yourself to distraction? Re­lief may come soon, sci­en­tists claim: they’ve found what they call the first known gene that con­trols the itch sensa­t­ion in the spi­nal cord or brain.

The re­search­ers pro­duced mice with­out the gene, that seem to lead bliss­fully itch-free lives. The work may quickly lead to ef­fec­tive new treat­ments for chron­ic, se­vere itch­ing, they pre­dicted.

The “itch gene” is called GRPR, which stands for gastrin-releasing pep­tide re­cep­tor. The gene codes for the pro­duc­tion of a re­cep­tor—or mo­lec­u­lar gate­way for chem­i­cal sig­nal­s—found in a small num­ber of spi­nal cord nerve cells. These cells trans­mit pain and itch sig­nals from the skin to the brain.

Lab mice lack­ing the gene scratched much less than nor­mal when giv­en itchy stim­u­li, said the re­search­ers, led by Zhou-Feng Chen at the Wash­ing­ton Un­ivers­ity School of Med­i­cine in St. Lou­is. The find­ings ap­pear in an ad­vance on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal  Na­ture this week.

Chron­ic itch­ing, a wide­spread prob­lem, can re­sult from skin dis­or­ders, or from deeper prob­lems such as kid­ney fail­ure or liv­er dis­ease. It can be a se­ri­ous side ef­fect of can­cer ther­a­pies or pow­er­ful painkillers. Chron­ic itch­ing can dis­rupt lives, in­ter­fer­ing with sleep or lead­ing to scars from all the scratch­ing. And ef­fec­tive treat­ments are few.

Itch re­search has been a bit ne­glected be­cause it “has lived in the shad­ow of pain re­search,” Chen said. “No one knew which gene was re­spon­si­ble for itch­ing in the brain or in the spi­nal cord un­til now.”

Even Chen’s team be­came in­ter­est­ed in GRPR be­cause they were look­ing for pain-related genes. Among those they were ex­am­in­ing, GRPR stood out be­cause it’s found only in these few spi­nal cord cells. They be­gan to study some mice that were mis­sing the gene.

Re­sults were “a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing at first,” Chen said, since the “knock­out” mice seemed to feel pain just as as oth­er mice. But then a post-doctoral fel­low, Yan-Gang Sun, in­jected the spi­nal cords of nor­mal mice with a sub­stance that stim­u­lates the gene. The ro­dents started scratch­ing them­selves stre­nously.

“That’s when we thought the gene might be in­volved in the itch sensa­t­ion,” Chen said. Fu­ture treat­ments for itch might in­volve sub­stances that in­ter­fere with the GRPR re­cep­tor mol­e­cule, he added, such as by at­tach­ing them­selves to it and gum­ming up their func­tion. Luck­i­ly, a few GRPR-dis­rupting sub­stances are al­ready known, he added, so all that needs to be done may be to go ahead and start test­ing them. “Now re­search­ers can study the ef­fect of these agents on the itch sensa­t­ion and pos­sibly move that re­search to clin­i­cal ap­plica­t­ions fairly soon.”

world-science.net


--------------------
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