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Published Sunday July 25, 2004 Meth - the quick way to drain your brain
THE NEW YORK TIMES

People who don't want to wait for old age to shrink their brains and sap their memory have a quicker alternative: Just abuse methamphetamine for a decade or so and watch the brain cells vanish into the night.

The first high-resolution MRI study of meth addicts shows "a forest fire of brain damage," said Dr. Paul Thompson, a specialist in brain mapping at the University of California-Los Angeles. "We expected some brain changes but didn't expect so much tissue to be destroyed."

The image, published in the June 30 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, shows the brain's surface and deeper limbic system.

The limbic region, involved in drug craving, reward, mood and emotion, lost 11 percent of its tissue. "The cells are dead and gone," Thompson said. Addicts were depressed, anxious and unable to concentrate.

The brain's center for making new memories, the hippocampus, lost 8 percent of its tissue, comparable to the brain deficits in early Alzheimer's. The meth addicts fared significantly worse on memory tests than healthy people the same age.

The study examined 22 people in their 30s who had used meth for 10 years, mostly by smoking it, and 21 controls matched for age. On average, the addicts used around 4 grams a week and said they had been high 19 of the 30 days before the study began.

Meth is an addictive stimulant made in clandestine labs nationwide. When taken by mouth, snorted, injected or smoked, it produces intense pleasure by releasing the brain's reward chemical, dopamine. With chronic use, the brains that overstimulate dopamine and serotonin are permanently compromised.

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