TUESDAY, June 4, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Taking drugs like cocaine is never smart, but add an all-night dance party to the mix and you could be headed for disaster.
That's because cocaine and other stimulants cause the body to overheat. At the same time, the drug limits the body's ability to cool down or even perceive the extra heat, concludes a study in today's issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
"It's a double-edged sword," says study author Dr. Craig Crandall, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. "When taking cocaine, you don't regulate your temperature as well, yet you don't feel hot."
Overheating is known as hyperthermia, and depending on the severity, it can cause heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heat stroke and even death, he says.
Crandall's team recruited seven healthy volunteers. They were tested on two separate days and given cocaine once and lidocaine, a topical painkiller, once as a control. Both the cocaine and the lidocaine were prepared in a solution that was applied to the insides of the volunteers' noses. Neither the doctors nor the patients knew which solution the participants were getting.
According to Crandall, it's difficult to know exactly what an average street dose of cocaine is, but he suspects the dose his team gave the study volunteers was significantly less than what most users would take.
The participants were between 23 and 37 years old, and were not taking any prescription or non-prescription drugs at the time of the study. They were also asked to refrain from tobacco, alcohol and caffeine for at least 12 hours before the experiment.
The study volunteers were fitted into special suits that regulated their skin's temperature. And a device to measure the body's internal temperature was placed in their esophagus.
The researchers found cocaine raises body temperature in two ways. First, it limits the amount of blood flow to the skin, which makes it difficult to sweat -- one of the body's best defenses against heat. Second, it reduces the perception of excessive heat, so the body doesn't even realize it needs to respond by sweating.
"Cocaine users need to understand that [the drug] increases the likelihood of heat injury because they won't think they're as hot as they actually are," Crandall says.
Wilkie A. Wilson, a professor of pharmacology at Duke University Medical Center and author of the book Just Say Know: Talking With Kids About Drugs and Alcohol, says this study confirms that a variety of the body's systems are affected by cocaine use.
"Using stimulants in a warm environment can be quite risky for your health," Wilson says. "People that might be tempted to use a stimulant like cocaine, ecstasy or amphetamines in a hot environment should know that they could incur significant damage to their brain from the hyperthermia.?
What To Do
For more information about keeping kids off drugs, visit the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA). NIDA also offers this article that explains how casual drug use can sometimes lead to addiction.
