Drug Tolerance?

Question

What is drug tolerance and why does it occur? What are two mechanisms underlying the development of tolerance?

Answer 1

Tolerance means the body creates an immunity to its effectiveness. For example, somebody tries cocaine and likes it. To attain a 'high' equal to the first high that got the person 'hooked,' the person has to keep takng more and more often in an effort to get the same effect because the body creates a tolerance level. Same with legal drugs - the strength and/or dosage has to increase to create the same effect - over time.

Sorry, can't help you with the 'mechanisms.'

Answer 2

Define Drug Tolerance

Answer 3

Drug Tolerance Definition

Answer 4

As Kessie said, tolerance is in a sense the body developing an immunity to a drug. There are good aspects and bad aspects of this. For example, and we are talking of legal drugs here, some drugs have side effects that the body adjust to, or tolerates, over time allowing the person to take the drug. In other cases the body develops tolerance to the drug itself requiring more and more of the drug to be effective. Eventually the side effects cannot be tolerated any more or the drug reaches toxic levels.
There are a number of mechanisms for tolerance. The major ones are increased development of toxic substances in the liver or kidneys such that the body can no longer eliminate them. The other is the closing or development of more receptor sites on cells, such as the synapses or dendrites of neurons, such that the drug no longer becomes effective. Some psychiatric drugs work by blocking these receptor sites such that creation of new ones eventually overrides the drugs effectiveness at that dose, but dose can't be increased infinitely. Every drug has a limit.

Answer 5

In reference to Kessie's response (which is not wrong just not the only possiblity)

I have a VERY high drug tolerance. I always have. It has absoletuly nothing to do with a built tolerance, it is just my own personal mechanism. I do not know if it stems from chemical balences or what, but I could do a drug for the FIRST time and have my tolerance to it be very high. I am not into doing drugs, I just happen to have a natural high tolerance.

My mother and youngest daughter seem to as well. Both have had an epidural that didn't work at all for them. One for labor one for surgery at age "4". She didnt have a drug habit. Unless you count trying to sneak a second flintstone chewable as one...... I have never had an epidural so I am unsure of my tolerance with that one.

Ok many times a doctor will prescribe something like darviset or vicodine for pain.... My oldest daughter takes one she is off her rocker, falling all over. Which even "dental gas" does to her. I could take 6 darviset at once, and you would have no clue I had taken any. It has "always" been that way for me with that type of medication. I have NOT built up any tolerances. Yet you give me per say a sinus pill............. it knocks me off my rocker.......

It seems to be a problem in this day and age to have any procedures or things done and to say well that medicene may not be strong enough to work for me we may need extra or stronger.......

I get some good looks. Yet if I say nothing I am the one who gets the pain without the medication....... Therefore I try to avoid it all.

It seems to apply to tylanol type products right on to prescribed ones. Yet as I said a sinus pill does me in. I basiically sleep them off as they make me almost in a drunken state??

What causes this I have no clue. I just know its what happens and I HAVE NO built up tolerances.

Therefore there are more than ONE type of drug tolerances. As I am very tolerant to some, sensitive to others. There are also ones that are of a built up tolerance too.

Answer 6

As a drug enters the blood stream our brain records the influence the chemical has on the system. Therefore the synapses in the nerve endings wire their selves in a particular direction, since the chemical has changed the chemical coming across the axions. With out these pathways being altered and the chemical changes the nervous system would not operate and you would die. Then if the chemical reaches across the blood brain barrier then its good bye for now.

Answer 7

No, no longer possibly. Alcohol and maximum anesthetics utilized in surgical treatment artwork in diverse techniques- has to do with the way the chemical compounds bind to neurons. even with the undeniable fact that, alcohol and opiates bind in comparable places to comparable neurons, so there is a few shown circulate-tolerance between alcohol and opiates. i could point out to the anesthetist which you have a extreme alcohol tolerance in basic terms in case they have been approximately to apply an opiate anesthetic, yet i do no longer think of there'll be a controversy.

Answer 8

I think it depends