Hmm... I wonder if this works on Opiate Itch?
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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
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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