You probably know that the United States and other areas of the world are in the midst of a huge opiate epidemic. You might be surprised that the abuse of such drugs can have other effects.
An opiate/opioid is a type of drug that can produce strong effects on the body and the mind. Doctors prescribe opioids as painrelieving medication, but opiates/opioids also include the illegal drug heroin (for the differences between these drugs, visit our opiates vs opioids page). In fact, many people who become addicted to opiates eventually use heroin because heroin is cheaper and easier to obtain than prescription drugs but produces many of the same effects.
Many doctors prescribed opiates in the 1990s and early 2000s, but growing awareness of the addictive properties of opiates has led government agencies and doctors to regulate the manufacturing, distributing, and prescribing of such drugs.
That’s not to say that these measures have eliminated opioid use entirely. Far from it. In fact, in 2013, doctors issued 207 million prescriptions for opioids. This doesn’t take into account the huge numbers of people who made or used opioids illegally, so millions of Americans used opioids in that year.
But if people can use drugs, they can often abuse them. This is sometimes the case with opiates. Abusing such drugs can lead to some unexpected side effects, like memory loss. This seems to have happened to a number of people in Massachusetts from 2012-16.
These people suffered from memory loss that resulted from insufficient blood circulation (ischemia) to both hemispheres of the hippocampus in the brain. This type of memory loss is otherwise rare, so researchers questioned whether something triggered such a relatively large number of cases in such an isolated geographic area during a relatively short amount of time.
Researchers who studied these cases of memory loss discovered that 13 of the 14 patients had histories of substance use disorder or tested positive for using opioids. While 14 patients is admittedly a small sample size, the fact that many of these patients had histories of substance use disorder could be an interesting correlation. It could be yet another illustration of the dangers of opiates/opioids.
