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Klaus Miczek
Thursday,
May
25, 2000 Biopsychosocial Research on Violence: Aggressive experiences impact on amines and and gene expression
Abstract: Aggression engenders significant immediate and long-term consequences for autonomic, endocrine and neurobiological activity. These processes are relevant for pain, emotion and drug abuse. At the behavioral level, being attacked by an aggressive opponent causes an intruder to defend, and eventually submit. At the pharmacological level, intense, unpredictable and uncontrollable social stress engenders naltrexone-reversible analgesia, opiate tolerance and withdrawal, involving m and d receptors. Concurrently, behavioral sensitization to dopaminergic challenges become evident, and cocaine self-administration is initiated more rapidly and maintained at higher rates. Neurochemically, dopamine concentrations are immediately increased in nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex, but not in striatum. Repeated social confrontations are anticipated by increased dopamine activity in n. accumbens, and followed by decreased serotonin. Within one hour of the social confrontation, immediate early genes are expressed in periaqueductal grey area, dorsal raphe n., and locus coeruleus. These molecular changes may be critical for the development of tolerance to opioid analgesia, behavioral sensitization to psychomotor stimulants, and increased psychomotor self-administration.
Klaus A. Miczek directs a psychopharmacology laboratory at Tufts University where he serves as Moses Hunt Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Neuroscience. He published some 150 research journal articles, 40 reviews and edited 10 volumes on psychopharmacological research concerning brain mechanisms of aggression, anxiety, social stress and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. He has served since 1983 on research review committees for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Mental Health, National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse. He was a member of the National Academy of Science panel on “Understanding and Preventing Violence” (1989-1992) as well as its ILAR/NRC panel on the “Psychological Well-being of Primates”. He is the Coordinating editor of Psychopharmacology since 1992, and he serves on the editorial board on half a dozen other journals in this area. He was the president of the Division of Psychopharmacology, and of the Behavioral Pharmacology Society, and chaired the Committee on Animals in Research and Ethics of the American Psychology Association. In 1993, he received the Solvay Duphar Award of the Division of Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse of the American Psychological Association for “Outstanding Basic Psychopharmacological Research on Affective Disorders”. He is the recipient of a MERIT award from the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse. He is a fellow or member of 10 scientific societies. He has lectured in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and at many universities in the US. In 1987, he was named the Boerhaave professor at the medical faculty of Leiden university (Netherlands), and during the last decade, he was a Japan International Science & Technology Fellow, he was visiting professor at “La Sapienza” university in Rome and at the Charles University in Prague. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the Charles University Medical Faculty (Czech Republic). In 1997, the president of the Federal Republic of Germany bestowed the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit on him. He was originally educated in Berlin, Germany, and received a Ph.D. degree in biopsychology from the University of Chicago. |
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