MAPS: Studying MDMA users

[Matthew Baggott <mbagg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 25 Apr 1999, Harry Sumnall wrote:

> entirely justified regarding premorbidity etc., I would not 
> know  how   to begin to formulate a study in RECREATIONAL 
> users that could ever control for all these influencing 
> factors, whether  extrapharmacological or pharmacological   
> ( and believe me i have tried very hard).Focus in the UK in 

It seems to me like you would need to get impulsivity, memory, and
other behavioral measures as well as PET scans of the 5-HTT
in a group of adolescents who have not yet started to use drugs.
Then you would do regular repeated measures and get drug use history
and the environmental conditions of drug use over the next 10 years or so.
With enough subjs you could compare different groups of drug users to
nondrug users.  Given the apparent high level of mdma use in some parts of
europe, this would be better done in your neck of the woods than here in
the states.

Ideally you'd also genotype for CYP2D6, 5-htt and tryptophan hydroxylase
variations..

You could sell such a study as an investigation of whether 5-ht related
parameters influence/predict the development of drug use.


Matthew Baggott, mbagg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Research Associate, Drug Dependence Research Center
University of California, San Francisco



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