PARTYGOERS who take the recreational drug ecstasy may face a greater risk of long-term brain damage if they bombard themselves with loud music all night long.
The warning follows experiments in rats that were simultaneously exposed to loud noise and MDMA, aka ecstasy. The noise both intensified and prolonged the effects of the drug on the animals’ brains.
Michelangelo Iannone of Italy’s Institute of Neurological Science in Catanzaro and his colleagues gave rats varying doses of MDMA while bombarding them with white noise for 3 hours at the maximum volume permitted in Italian nightclubs.
Those given the highest dose of…
