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Cocaine doesn't just do damage to your brain. It can trigger heart attacks and death by causing the blood vessels that feed your heart to spasm and reduce blood
by Daniel_Newby 15y ago
Cocaine doesn't just do damage to your brain. It can trigger heart attacks and death by causing the blood vessels that feed your heart to spasm and reduce blood flow.
Free cocaine does that. This immunization causes the body to produce cocaine-sequestering antibodies.
... some addicts had up to 5x the level of cocaine in their systems ...
To understand the implications of that ratio, you need to know the total cocaine binding capacity, which would require considerably more exotic laboratory tests.
- skue 15y agoA good point, but antibody sequestration isn't how they explained the vaccine's actions. Instead it's that the cocaine-antibody complex is too large to cross the blood-brain barrier. So it's unclear whether the antibody response (which the study showed was limited) would sequester the cocaine enough to eliminate its systemic effects.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago... the cocaine-antibody complex is too large to cross the blood-brain barrier. If the cocaine were weakly bound, it would spend part of its time detached from the antibodies, and during those times be able to enter the brain in the usual way. Since the antibodies have a large effect on the psychological effect-response curve, the binding must be quite strong. Therefore cocaine is sequestered throughout the body.