Ricerc@Sapienza

Some studies have shown a connection between asthma deaths and opiate abuse, but the process in which opiates exacerbate asthma is still unclear. Opiates may impair judgment during an acute asthma attack, leading to inadequate treatment. Alterations in mental status may increase aspiration risk. Some studies have also demonstrated an opiate-induced bronchoconstriction. In the present study, data on opiate deaths in the Department of Forensic Sciences of Sapienza University of Rome and in Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Chicago (USA) have been collected.

Previous studies have shown that individuals with heroin and cocaine addiction prefer to use these drugs in distinct settings: mostly at home in the case of heroin and mostly outside the home in the case of cocaine. Here we investigated whether the context would modulate the affective and neural responses to these drugs in a similar way. First, we used a novel emotional task to assess the affective state produced by heroin or cocaine in different settings, based on the recollections of male and female drug users.

Previous studies have shown that rats trained to self-administer heroin and cocaine exhibit opposite preferences, as a function of setting, when tested in a choice paradigm. Rats tested at home prefer heroin to cocaine, whereas rats tested outside the home prefer cocaine to heroin. Here, we investigated whether drug history would influence subsequent drug preference in distinct settings. Based on a theoretical model of drug-setting interaction, we predicted that regardless of drug history rats would prefer heroin at home and cocaine outside the home.