Lecture 11-Psychopharmacology Flashcards
Exam 2
What are the biological characteristics that makeup characteristics of users?
Genetic factors, sex, weight, and age
Genetic factors
- Includes initial sensitivity to a drug
Biological charcteristics: sex
- Fat content vs. water content; women have more fat
- Drug concentrations are diluted with more water content
- So, men have higher tolerances than women
Biological charcteristics: weight
More blood and body fluids leads to more diluted drug concentration
-so the heavier you are the more you need
Biological characteristics: age
- enzyme systems are immature or non-existent in children
- enzyme systems are impaired in the elderly
- so children/the elderly have less mechanisms to break down drugs (so they need less)
Psychological characteristics
- Personality plays a big role (think, perceives, feels, act)
- Sensation-seeking: need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences/ willingness to take physical and social risks for the sake of such experiences
- SRD
- “Addictive” personality
What are the four parts of sensation-seeking?
- Adventure seeking
- Experience seeking
- Disinhibition/disinhibited
- Boredom susceptibility
frequency of drug/alcohol use positively associated with sensation seeking
What is SRD?
- Stress-response dampening
- Increased susceptibility to stress reduction with drug use
- Model says that certain people are prone to using alcohol and drugs to escape from negative life experiences
Psychological Characteristics: Addictive personality
- Hypothesis of a personality structure common to all people with SUDs, but little evidence in support of this
- However, often more aggressive, impusive, thrill seeking, rebellius, gregarious (sociable), personal power and extroverted
User characteristics risk factors
- Parents acceptance of drug use
- Poor school performance/school absences
- Perceived peer approval
- Alcohol intoxication before age 13
- Emotional distress/Conflict with parents
User characteristics: protective factors
- child’s degree of attachment to parent
- parental supervision
- commitment to school
- involvement in activities (athletics, arts, religion, etc)
User characteristics
Expectancies and beliefs
- May influence perceived effects
- commonly seen w alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine
User characteristics
Environment
- social vs alone
- learning from others (watching how experienced users act and respond)
Psychopharmacology Phenomena
- Tolerance
- Sensitization
- Drug abuse, drug dependence, addiction (synonymous based on current DSM criteria)
Who is mithridates and what did he do?
- Prine of persian and Greek ancestry (135-63 BC)
- The first recorded example of drug tolerance (mithridatism)
- Took sub-lethal doses of poison for years and developed tolerance (reffered to as mithridate
- Mithridate was used as an “antidote”
What is dispositional tolerance?
- Metabolic
- refers to pharmacokinetics (what the body does to the drug)
What is functional tolerance?
- Refers to PD (what the drug does to the body)- is when site of action is less sensitive
- Includes acute, protracted, cross, and reverse tolerance
What type of tolerance is acute tolerance and what does it mean?
- A type of functional tolerance
- aka tachyphylaxis
- seen with alcohol (decrease in response within a single exposure to the drug)
- cocaine- 2nd does before 1st has worn off
Protracted tolerance
- falls under functional tolerance
- is when more is needed to achieve the same effect
Cross tolerance
- tolerance to other drugs w similar effects
- ex. alcohol and anesthetics
Reverse tolerance
- aka sensitization
- Heightened sensitivity to drug’s effects after a period of abstinence
- seen with cocaine and marijuana
Cell Adaptation
- homeostasis hypothesis: the brain is “plastic” and attempts to restore balance (compensation)
- If drug increases NT availability, then NT levels decrease and receptor levels decrease (downregulate)… we saw this with the dopamine D2 receptors in coke addicts
