Keeping breathing steady and safe
By John Travis
Opiates, including morphine and fentanyl, are powerful painkillers and anesthetics, but they also can slow a person’s breathing to a dangerous rate. Scientists studying the kernel of brain cells that controls a body’s breathing rhythm may have discovered a way to prevent this sometimes-fatal side effect.
Over the past decade, biologists have pinpointed a region in the brain stem called the pre-Bötzinger complex and learned that it generates the electrical impulses that drive breathing (SN: 1/4/03, p. 8: Available to subscribers at Breathtaking Science). Nerve cells in this region have proteins on their surfaces that respond to opiates, which is how drugs that bind to the proteins suppress breathing.