Growing treatment of severe withdrawal in patients with opioid use points to the consequences of the increase of medetomidine in street fentanyl supply

When a patient arrives at the hospital with an acetaminophen overdose, it’s often a race against the clock. The only FDA-approved antidote for overdose-related liver injury, N‑acetylcysteine, must be administered within hours to be effective.

But in a new study published today in PNAS, researchers used a novel approach in an animal model that could eventually help buy more time for these patients. A team of University of Pittsburgh researchers identified a previously unrecognized liver-protection pathway—and harnessed it with an experimental mRNA therapy that reduced liver injury in mice, even when given at a much later point in time than the currently available antidote.

Neuroscientists at Northwestern University have made the surprising discovery that response speed on an exhalation is faster than on an inhalation by an average of 41 milliseconds (1/25th of a second). Response speed during pauses between breaths is also faster than inhalation by 21 milliseconds.

The study is the first experiment to measure response speed during all phases of respiration including the pauses between.