The role of vitamin C on prevention of morphine addiction in rats

Objectives: Today, addiction is one of the most important social problems. Morphine is an addictive drug which causes several alterations in human body. Both acute and chronic administration of morphine increase releasing of dopamine which leads to dependence and tolerance to it. One of the most important factors that prevent addicted people from abandonment is painful symptoms of withdrawal syndrome. So finding a method to decrease withdrawal symptoms can be a good protocol to defeat this challenge. Since vitamin C which is released from glutaminergic neurons is a modulator of central dopaminergic and glutaminergic transmissions, we decided to study the role of it on prevention and decreasing physical dependence of morphine addiction in rats.

Methods: In this study we evaluated withdrawal symptoms (e.g. jumping, wet dog shaking) after naloxane injection in sham (normal saline i.p. injection), control (fixed doses of morphine i.p. injection) and test (500mg/kg vitamin C i.p. injection before morphine daily) groups.

Results: Our data showed that both the tendency and most of the withdrawal signs (jamping, standing and wet dog shaking) in the test animals were significantly less than the control animals (p<0.05).

Conclusion: Our findings support the use of vitamin C as a potent agent in treatment of addicts.