Sunday, September 04, 2022

Fentanyl’s stops your breathing before you realize it

Recommendable! This should scare the heck out of fentanyl users or would be users! Why not advertise this more prominently to would be users!

"... tests of the brain’s electrical activity revealed fentanyl’s effects over time and indicated that the drug stops people’s breathing before other noticeable changes and before they lose consciousness.
In the study, electroencephalogram (EEG) tests were run for 25 patients undergoing general anesthesia for surgeries lasting two hours or more. The researchers discovered that certain EEG patterns were associated with respiration, sedation, and loss of consciousness. ...
The EEG tests ... revealed that fentanyl begins to impair breathing about four minutes before there is any change in alertness and at 1,700-times lower drug concentrations than those that cause sedation. “This explains why fentanyl is so deadly: it stops people’s breathing before they even realize it,” ...
The findings make it clear that no amount of fentanyl would be safe outside of a clinical setting with trained specialists. ..."

From the abstract:
"Opioid drugs influence multiple brain circuits in parallel to produce analgesia as well as side effects including respiratory depression. At present we do not have real-time clinical biomarkers of these brain effects. We describe here the results of an experiment to characterize the electroencephalographic signatures of fentanyl in humans. We find that increasing concentrations of fentanyl induce a frontal theta band (4-8 Hz) signature distinct from slow-delta oscillations related to sleep and sedation. We also report that respiratory depression, quantified by decline in an index of instantaneous minute ventilation, occurs at ≈ 1700-fold lower concentrations than those that produce sedation as measured by reaction time. The EEG biomarker we describe could facilitate real-time monitoring of opioid drug effects and enable more precise and personalized opioid administration."

Study reveals fentanyl’s effects on the brain – Harvard Gazette

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