The Sara Bellum Blog

What are your biggest questions about drug abuse? What words come to mind when you think about addiction?

We took the transcript from the morning session at NIDA’s 2008 Chat Day and used it to make this “word cloud.” The biggest words are the words that were used most often in the conversation between teens and NIDA scientists—like drugs, school, and high. There were lots of questions about specific drugs, including marijuana, alcohol, and tobacco, and also about how to find help if you’re worried that you or a friend might have problems with drug abuse or addiction. If you look closely you can spot NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow, who was answering questions online with kids, and some schools that participated in Chat Day, like Rockville High in Maryland and Yonkers High in New York.

It’s kind of cool to see a conversation between scientists and teens all summed up in a picture like this! You can read frequently asked questions from NIDA’s Chat Day. And you can make your own word cloud pictures using any website or text at www.wordle.net.

Remember all the noise about the bad economy and how Congress was passing a “Stimulus Act” to help? The name of this bill is the “American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA)”. The idea is to give stimulus money to government agencies, who can then send it out around the country to save jobs or create new ones.

As a government agency, NIDA got more than $260 million through ARRA to support more research projects on drug abuse and addiction. Some of that money has already been used to support students who are working this summer in science labs around the country.  Here are some other projects that ARRA money is helping with:

In Cincinnati, 250 teenage girls will participate in a study that looks at how stress, depression, and smoking could affect bone health. Results could help educate girls about how smoking affects their bones, so that fewer girls will start.

In New York, scientists will use NIDA’s ARRA money to see if parents can be trained with online programs to help them communicate better with their teens.

In Seattle, Washington, researchers will use ARRA money to figure out better ways to help college students hooked on marijuana to stop using the drug and focus on a healthy lifestyle instead.

And in Augusta, Georgia, scientists like Dr. Beth NeSmith (see photo) will be looking at liver damage caused by cocaine use.

These are just a few examples of thousands of projects that NIDA will support around the country using ARRA money. Since NIDA is just one of the 27 Institutes and Offices at the National Institutes of Health, you can imagine how many people in the U.S. are benefiting–both people working in the labs, and patients who will hopefully end up a little closer to a cure. The Sara Bellum Blog thinks that’s a really “stimulating” idea.

Dr. Beth NeSmith, assistant professor at the Medical College of Georgia School of Nursing, is among the first in the nation to receive NIDA's stimulus funding and will study kidney damage in local cocaine users.

What can our bodies do without us even thinking about it? Lots of things, actually. And that’s what the Word of the Day is about. The Brainstem, not surprisingly, is a “stem” that connects the brain to the spinal cord. Its basic functions include directing heart rate, breathing, arousal, and sleeping. Lucky for us, the brainstem does all these things automatically. That’s why you don’t forget to breathe when you’re asleep!

How? The brainstem directs the spinal cord, other parts of the brain, and the body to do what is necessary to maintain our life.

The brainstem is one of the more primitive parts of our brain—it dates back to the age of the dinosaurs! Just like another primitive part of our brain, the limbic system.

One of the reasons that addictive drugs exert such powerful control over our behavior is that they act directly on our primitive brainstem and limbic system.

For more brainy words and others, check out the NIDA for Teens glossary that fuels my words of the day.

Hollywood is exciting, glamorous, dramatic, funny, and can make just about anything seem cool—including drug abuse, and especially the use of marijuana. But films don’t tell you the whole story. Did you know there are over 400 different chemicals in marijuana smoke? Did you know that marijuana smoke really does hurt your memory, judgment and perception? And yes—you can get addicted to marijuana!

In this video, NIDA scientist Dr. Joe Frascella explains why marijuana is not all its “glammed” up to be. Dr. Frascella runs the division of NIDA that deals with clinical neuroscience, human development, and behavioral treatment for drug abuse and addiction—so he knows a little more about the science of marijuana than your average film director. Watch the video and see how much of this you already know—and how good you think Hollywood is at telling the real story.

This is a guest SBB post from NIDA intern Giselle.

“Comorbidity” is a strange word, right? Well, at least for me it was. I have to admit it that it was the first scientific word I learned during my internship here at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)–my Spanish accent still gives me a hard time pronouncing it. On the first day of my internship I had to read and get acquainted with the extensive research that NIDA has done and published. Comorbidity was featured in NIDA’s Research Report Series.

So, what’s co-mor-bi-di-ty? Here’s what NIDA scientists say: “When two disorders or illnesses occur in the same person, together or one after the other, they are called comorbid.” Having two disorders together can also cause them to interact in ways that make both of them worse.   

So what does all of that really mean? It means that sometimes two illnesses go together. For example, people who have depression or other mental illness are often addicted to drugs as well, and vice versa-so that’s why scientists say depression is often “comorbid with” drug abuse.

NIDA scientists aren’t completely sure why depressed people are more likely to have a drug abuse problem. But here’s my take on it. Everyone has had the so-called ‘mood swings.’ If someone feels really bad, they may want to ‘ease their mind’ with drugs.  Unfortunately, that can lead to a second disease - addiction to drugs - and then they feel even worse than they did before.

That’s what’s really bad about comorbid diseases: they can make each other worse! If someone is depressed, it’s harder to be motivated to quit using drugs. And if someone is using drugs, it can interfere with their treatment for depression.

What other diseases could you think could be comorbid? And why? It’s food for thought.

That’s what 17 year old Daniel Jeffrey Martin from Desert Vista High School heard from his mom one day while driving near a piece of the desert near his home town of Phoenix, Arizona. “Huh?” he asked. His mom, a forensic scientist (think: CSI), explained to him that when dead bodies are found in the desert by animals like coyotes, bobcats, and wolves, these scavengers will usually eat them—except for the bodies of methamphetamine users (proven by an autopsy).

Daniel thought this would be a perfect science fair project so he studied the records from the local county coroner’s office. And sure enough—he learned that even scavenging animals don’t want to go near the nasty chemicals left in the body by meth. YUK!

These photos from Daniel's science fair poster show the type of marks left by animal scavengers on bones. In his study, Daniel learned that the coroner found fewer scavenging marks on bodies that contained traces of methamphetamines.

The science project was so well done that Daniel won a Second Place Addiction Science Award from NIDA at the 2009 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair . You can read more about his project at NIDA’s website.

Winner Daniel Jeffrey Martin with NIDA science fair judges at the 2009 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.