PMID: 11606659Oct 19, 2001Paper

Morphine induces synchronous oscillatory discharges in the rat locus coeruleus

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
H Zhu, W Zhou

Abstract

The noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) plays a role in opioid dependence and withdrawal. In the present study, using a multiple-electrode recording technique that allowed several LC neurons to be recorded simultaneously over long time periods, LC neuronal activities were recorded before and after intracerebroventricular injection of morphine (26 nmol) under halothane anesthesia. We found that morphine did not simply decrease firing rates of LC neurons, as reported in earlier studies, but that it induced persistent oscillatory discharges in 49% (87 of 178) of the LC neurons recorded. Cross-correlation analysis revealed that almost all LC neurons (86 of 87) that exhibited oscillatory discharges were synchronized with at least one other neuron. When stated in terms of simultaneously recorded neuron pairs, 59% (292 of 492) of the oscillatory neuron pairs discharged synchronously. The morphine-induced synchronous oscillation began at approximately 10 min after morphine injection, reached its peak in approximately 20-30 min, persisted throughout the recording periods (up to 110 min after morphine injection, the longest recording time), and were reversed by an opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone. These data suggest that although the...Continue Reading

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