Family history of alcoholism and hypothalamic opioidergic activity.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Naloxone, published as a randomized controlled trial.

This study was designed to assess whether nonalcoholic offspring from families with a high density of alcohol-dependent individuals have altered endogenous central nervous system opioid activity.

Why It Was Studied

Naloxone hydrochloride stimulates plasma cortisol by blocking opioidergic input on the corticotropin-releasing factor neuron, thereby providing a noninvasive method for measuring hypothalamic opioid tone.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are teenagers and adults, both men and women.

Forty-eight nonalcoholic subjects aged 18 to 25 years were enrolled in a protocol to measure endogenous opioid activity by inducing opioid receptor blockade with the receptor antagonist, naloxone.

Twenty-six subjects were offspring from families with a high density of alcohol dependence and were designated as family history-positive subjects.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and double-blind study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Naloxone and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

As a double-blind Naloxone study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

Twenty-two subjects were biological offspring of nonalcohol-dependent parents and designated as family history-negative subjects.

Serum cortisol levels were monitored.

What Was Measured

Naloxone hydrochloride stimulates plasma cortisol by blocking opioidergic input on the corticotropin-releasing factor neuron, thereby providing a noninvasive method for measuring hypothalamic opioid tone.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Alcoholism, Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone, Family, Hydrocortisone, Hypothalamus, Naloxone and Opioid Peptides.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of Naloxone.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 1998 (Archives of general psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.