I thought about benzos or alcohol withdrawal which can be deadly but then I noticed that not all drug withdrawals have the potential to be deadly. Is there any rule?
In: Biology
I’ll try to make it simple, alcohol and benzos act as depressant of the central nervous system : it calms down the neurons firing and that’s why it has a soothing effect.
What happens is that they act on a receptor present on neurons called GABA-A receptor. Chronically, if you take benzos or alcohol at a very high frequency for a long time, the GABA-A receptors will slowly get reduced in order to adapt the body response to the chronic use of benzos/alcohol.
When this happened, the number of GABA-A receptor will be so low, that when the person stop drinking or stop taking their benzos, the central nervous system will fire up full force and provoke seizure that could be deadly. It takes several days/weeks for the numbers of receptors to go back to normal and that’s why you usually stop progressively your benzo medication and stop drinking alcohol by using benzos and reducing the dosage over a few weeks.
The same mechanism happen for other drugs such as nicotine with nicotine receptors except that nicotine receptors are not as important in maintaing the general activity of the central nervous system like GABA-A does. So withdrawal will affect the brain but will induce discomfort and not seizures.
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