Why does morphine make you itch?
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 22000005.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2011.09.026.
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Abstract
Opioids such as morphine numb pain but often concomitantly induce itch. Liu et al. (2011) now separate the sensation of itch from opioid-induced analgesia, showing that in a subset of spinal neurons, morphine directly induces itch by signaling through a heteromer of opioid- and itch-mediating G protein-coupled receptors.