I know this is a rookie question, but I would like to know how drugs such as sleeping pills that you take orally make their way to the brain.
There is a particular study right now about how researchers erase specific long term memories in rats and chicks by injecting an alkaloid into the brain and making them recall the memory. Its called chelerythrine. (It is a protein kinase C inhibitor identical to ZIP, or zeta-interacting-protein.)
I know this is just at the base level, but isn't that how most drugs that affect the brain start out? Such as injecting diphenhydramine into the brain, and now you just take it orally to fall asleep?
I am interested in the study I mentioned and would like the know some things/your opinions.
Assuming chelerythrine is a totally safe drug to ingest, do you think its memory disrupting ability would be effective if ingested rather than injected? Is it at all possible that you could take chelerythrine orally and it would affect memory?
I know that recalling a memory ( reconsolidation) warps it more and more every time, and I know that when patients are forced to focus on a specific memory while undergoing ECT, that specific memory is erased. They also make the rats and chicks recall a specific memory when they inject chelerythrine/ZIP and the memory that they recall during its effects is erased.
So I wonder if when chelerythrine is taken orally (which one day it may be) while trying to recall a specific memory, if that memory could be erased. The matter of whether chelerythrine/ZIP is effective at disrupting long term memory isn't in question. It has been proven effective at said task. But not when taken orally. So I would like to know if you think it could be effective at disrupting memory if ingested.
For an orally ingested drug to affect the brain it will need to be broken down in the stomach, some active ingredient will need to enter the blood stream and then the drug (or in some cases a precursor that is converted in the brain, ie., a prodrug) crosses the blood brain barrier where it generally acts on a neurotransmitter receptor system. According to the following article chelerythrine does appear to cross the BBB:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2711775/
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