How do you counter the side effects of MDMA?

[Dr. Lector]

I?ve already posted a question like this in the allo boards, but I should?ve asked the doctors from the beginning instead of my fellow students. I used to do ecstasy quit often, but haven?t touched any drugs since new years 2001/2002. So it has been around 15 months, but I find my memory is not as good as it used to be. Is there anything I can do to improve or regain my memory? I?m having such a hard time now trying to study, especially neuroanatomy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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[zpdoc]

I don't think there's any evidence that doing a lot of X affects your memory. I'd be more worried about developing parkinsonian symptoms in 15-20 yrs if I were you. There was a science paper recently that showed that primates who were given typical "party" doses of X had their dopaminergic cells of their substantia nigra wiped out. Not good. My advice: don't do any more X.

 

[El Duderino]

Also, doesn't MDMA fry frontal serotonergic neurons? I think that would create pretty ugly depressions...

 

[Aaargh]

Certainly mdma is fraught with risks and much more remains unknown than is known. But I'd hate to leave the original poster worrying about that Science article which was really pretty ridiculous when you take a look. The "typical party doses" killed 1/5 of the participants, and would've killed another 1/5 had not the researchers avoided giving them the third dose (that's the third dose in a 6 hour period mind you, now that's a party I'd hate missing!). The researchers failed to cite a huge category of data including human studies showing no change in dopamine levels. I'd be more worried about axonal degeneration, or, as I said, the unknown which is probably the real risk. Etc.

As for what you can do, that's the cool thing about neurosciences. We're just starting to explore this stuff.

 

[eddieberetta]

As for what you can do, that's the cool thing about neurosciences. We're just starting to explore this stuff.

In other words: there is currently nothing you can do.

As a side note, the volume of info in anatomy is huge compared to most other courses -- your memory may not be as bad as you think!

Cheers