Fentanyl Has Been Shown to Cause Autism-Like Behavior in a Harvard-Funded Study

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Fentanyl Has Been Shown To Cause Autism-Like Behavior in a Harvard-Funded Study:

One of the most often administered analgesics in hospitals is fentanyl, a mu-opioid receptor agonist that has the potential to permanently damage rats' behavior and sensorimotor abilities. It is unknown, however, if fentanyl usage contributes to the development of autism. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Shanghai 10th People's Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania have shown in an animal study that fentanyl can cause alterations in young male and female mice that are comparable to behaviors seen in autism. The results have been published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Other studies have demonstrated that N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor dysfunction contributes to autism. Autism is linked to variations in the Grin2a and Grin2b genes, which encode the GluN2A and GluN2B subunits of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor. Autism also affects the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain.

The current study found that fentanyl causes autistic-like behaviors in young male and female mice by activating the mu-opioid receptor in the anterior cingulate brain. Furthermore, these fentanyl-induced autistic-like behaviors seem to be partially driven by the reduction of Grin2b expression in the mice's anterior cingulate cortex induced by hypermethylation.

"Because the anterior cingulate cortex is a hub for mediating social information, we focused on the expression of Grin2b in that area," says Yuan Shen, MD, Ph.D., the paper's senior author and a professor of Psychiatry at Shanghai 10th People's Hospital. "We found fentanyl decreased expression of Grin2b in the anterior cingulate cortex. The overexpression of Grin2b prevents fentanyl-induced autism-like behavior in the mice. These findings suggest a potential mechanism to prevent or treat the autism-like behavior," says Shen.

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